In a message dated 2/23/2008 9:43:03 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, tonysidaway(a)gmail.com writes: A book cover is not free unless it's specifically licensed as such by the copyright owner. If that's what you think of as tendentious, it's hardly going to surprise anyone if you describe a lot of the tagging as tendentious. "Free" does NOT mean "we can probably get away with using this here under fair use", >> ----------------------------------------------------- And no one has ever implied that a book cover is free use. However, imho, it is *fair use*. However, some editors want to eliminate any fair use entirely from the project. That to me is not in the best interests of the project. If, in a biography of Patti Smith, we have no free images of Patti Smith, but we have a book cover of her biography writen by John Brown or whatever, and that book cover, is in fact, a photograph of Patti Smith, we can and should use it in the article. That photograph enhances the project, harms no one, and is fair use. Rejecting it for bureaucratic reasons, making the *rule* more important than the participants, is not in the best interests of the project. I'm not suggesting we have a rule for not using book covers. I'm suggesting that those people who interpret our policy to state that, are harming the project. Some editors place the rules as gods over the community, without realizing that it is the community which made the rules. Some editors place such a high reliance in their personal interpretations of general policy, to fit specific situations, that they cannot comprehend how harmful their actions are to the project, when they create such a level of internal discord, and when the end-result denigrates the project without creating any enhanced value. The removal of all fair use photographs does nothing useful for the project. It does however harm it, by removing useful illustrations from articles that could use them, replacing their removal with a vacancy filled by nothing. That isn't progress. Will Johnson **************Ideas to please picky eaters. Watch video on AOL Living. (http://living.aol.com/video/how-to-please-your-picky-eater/rachel-campos-du… 2050827?NCID=aolcmp00300000002598)