One way that I think would increase the value of our "fair use" tags, and prevent them from being just slapped around haphazardly, is if they contained their justifications a little more explicitly, and also explained themselves a little more specifically.
Here's an example I've been playing with (obviously it could enjoy some editing, but I think my intent should be clear), for a fair use tag which could be used on photographic portraits of individuals (not promotional material, necessarily) used to illustrate articles: -- This is a copyrighted photographic portrait of a notable individual. It is believed that this qualifies under the fair use provision of United States copyright law (see copyrights), because the editor of Wikipedia who has placed this copyright tag believes it to satisify the following criteria: 1. It is used for purely educational purposes and significantly enhances value of the encyclopedia article it is being used to illustrate and is not meant to defraud or otherwise harm the existing copyright holder. 2. Alternative photographs under a free license have not been located and seem unlikely to currently exist. 3. Its total pixel dimensions is far below any suitable print resolution. As such it is only provides a limited amount of reproducibility and in limited applications. 4. Its ultimate source and likely copyright holder is listed above if known, for those seeking to license the photograph for their own use. If it is not known, its immediate source is listed above, who may be possibly contacted for copyright information as well. 5. It is being used on the English edition of Wikipedia, which is sponsored by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, for the purpose of creating an encyclopedia and spreading general knowledge. If you are re-using Wikipedia content for another website (see our copyright policy), these fair use criteria may not apply. Please note that the posting of copyrighted material that does not have the express permission of the copyright holder may be in violation of applicable law and of our policy. Those with a history of violations may be temporarily suspended from editing pages. ---- I didn't note all of the links and wikis, but suffice to say important terms (i.e. "notability") would be linked, and the links to the Foundation and Wikipedia itself would be hard-linked (URLs).
The benefits I see in a (long) tag like this is: 1. Its very use defines what characteristics the picture must have. It would thus be very easy to spot whether or not it was incorrectly placed or incorrectly used, and hopefully any user applying it would understand what it meant. This is meant both to help police fair use images, and also to help users who don't have a great understanding of the requirements of the fair use clause. 2. It makes fair use look like serious business. Which it should be. 3. It clearly states that the fair use criteria may only apply to the English Wikipedia, and that other re-users of content will have to re-think whether the criteria applies to their our pages. 4. I think that if a copyright holder saw this, they'd at least understand what they'd be going up against. Current fair use tags provide no justifications for the decision (we're told it may have been discussed, but we know that's not usually true) -- this one at least has it built into it.
So... thoughts? Obviously the wording should be fixed up a bit, but that can be done in the standard fashion. I'm more interested in whether or not the concept is good (and whether some of the specifics that I think are important are worthwhile -- i.e. the low print resolution, which I think makes it clear that we are not trying to encourage copyright violation). If so, this is something which could easily be done, in one way or another, for all of our fair use tags.
FF
I second your proposal, FF, this would be a step in the right direction. - Haukur
Postscript:
I also think it would be a good idea to create a template along the lines of {{fairuse-reviewed}} which would contain the normal fair use notice, as well as something like "The fair use criteria of this item has been reviewed and found satisfactory by at least one other user." or something like that. The process of reviewing fair use images would then be one of converting {{fairuse}} tags to {{fairuse-reviewed}} (after they had been reviewed). Perhaps a Wikiproject of some form would be good for this? Anyway, it would allow us to keep track of things. Just a thought.
FF
On 7/10/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
FF
On 10/07/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Postscript:
I also think it would be a good idea to create a template along the lines of {{fairuse-reviewed}} which would contain the normal fair use notice, as well as something like "The fair use criteria of this item has been reviewed and found satisfactory by at least one other user." or something like that. The process of reviewing fair use images would then be one of converting {{fairuse}} tags to {{fairuse-reviewed}} (after they had been reviewed). Perhaps a Wikiproject of some form would be good for this? Anyway, it would allow us to keep track of things. Just a thought.
I like this idea; might need a lot of manpower, though, and people do tend to have rather wide-ranging differences in how stringently they accept copyright restrictions. (I've more than once heard "well, it *should* be free" used to defend copyvios, and in one delightful case encountered someone who thought "in the public domain" meant *both* "this information is not secret" and "this information is free to copy"...). But I'd certainly be interested in seeing it work.
One fair-use problem, that I've been mulling over of late (I've been incommunicado for a few days), is that of context.
With something like a publicity photo of $celebrity, "fair use" is fairly incontrovertible. But... let's say we're dealing with the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the much-discussed photo thereof; assume it's tagged as fair use.
Even if would be fair use to use this to illustrate an article on the [[Lindisfarne Gospels]] (rare item, not much photographed, &c.) despite it being copyrighted... would it be fair use to use it to illustrate an article on, say, [[Rare-book photography]]? Sure, it's an example of such an image, but there's certainly thousands more of equal usability. How about using it to illustrate an article on [[Books]], or the [[Bible]]? Again, some relevance, but other images are just as good or better.
As I understand fair use - I don't claim to, one set of copyright law is confusing enough - it is quite dependent on the claim being a reasonable one in context.
But we'd have the one image, tagged as {{fairuse}} without that context; anyone wondering about using it in another article would simply see that we had it, it was under a legitimate-use license of some form, and slap it in their article, unless they were the introspective type given to considering license details.
This may, potentially, be a problem with the way we tag things - fair use inherently seems to imply "in the context of the article for which it was originally used". It may be fair use the second time (and probably is), but may not... I don't know what, if anything, to do about this, but thought I'd kick it out.
You've raised some good points, Andrew.
Even if would be fair use to use this to illustrate an article on the [[Lindisfarne Gospels]] (rare item, not much photographed, &c.) despite it being copyrighted... would it be fair use to use it to illustrate an article on, say, [[Rare-book photography]]? Sure, it's an example of such an image, but there's certainly thousands more of equal usability. How about using it to illustrate an article on [[Books]], or the [[Bible]]? Again, some relevance, but other images are just as good or better.
Indeed. Here's another example. I'd argue that it's legitimate and inevitable fair use to use copyrighted artwork by a living or "recently" deceased artist in an article *about the artist*. Using it to illustrate other articles is unnecessary and not appropriate. Look at this image, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Branstock.jpg
If we were using it in an article about the artist [[Alan Lee]] I'd say it was fine. But we're not. Instead we're using it to illustrate articles on Norse mythology. I don't know enough U.S. law to know whether that's legal or not but it's certainly not necessary.
And just so you can see how deep our fair use problem goes this image was recently uploaded by User:Wiglaf, who is an admin and an excellent editor (one I'm working with all the time). I don't mean to slight him in any way. In fact about half of the images in [[Category:Images from Norse mythology]] were uploaded by him and almost all are in the public domain.
This is also an education problem for those of us who aren't legal types and/or who aren't from the U.S. Scandinavian editors like Wiglaf and me hear that Wikipedia is under U.S. law and that something called "fair use" is okay. From how it seems to be used on Wikipedia it's natural to assume that it works something like this:
"You can use some copyrighted material without asking for permission as long as you don't do too much of it."
But that seems to be pretty far from the truth.
So, the people in the know need to educate those of us who aren't really.
This may, potentially, be a problem with the way we tag things - fair use inherently seems to imply "in the context of the article for which it was originally used". It may be fair use the second time (and probably is), but may not... I don't know what, if anything, to do about this, but thought I'd kick it out.
Right. We don't really have a technical solution to that within our present system. But if we're going to go through all the fair use images and add information to them we could make sure that we explicitly mention that we've verified that the image is fair use for pages foo, bar and foobar. Anyone wanting to use the image on a new page should then add to the image information page.
Regards, Haukur
I think these are good comments. One way around this might be to make fair use tags require article names, i.e., {{fairuse|Article}}, which would then start off by saying, "This page is copyrighted etc. but thought to be fair use on the article {{article}}..."
FF
On 7/10/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/07/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Postscript:
I also think it would be a good idea to create a template along the lines of {{fairuse-reviewed}} which would contain the normal fair use notice, as well as something like "The fair use criteria of this item has been reviewed and found satisfactory by at least one other user." or something like that. The process of reviewing fair use images would then be one of converting {{fairuse}} tags to {{fairuse-reviewed}} (after they had been reviewed). Perhaps a Wikiproject of some form would be good for this? Anyway, it would allow us to keep track of things. Just a thought.
I like this idea; might need a lot of manpower, though, and people do tend to have rather wide-ranging differences in how stringently they accept copyright restrictions. (I've more than once heard "well, it *should* be free" used to defend copyvios, and in one delightful case encountered someone who thought "in the public domain" meant *both* "this information is not secret" and "this information is free to copy"...). But I'd certainly be interested in seeing it work.
One fair-use problem, that I've been mulling over of late (I've been incommunicado for a few days), is that of context.
With something like a publicity photo of $celebrity, "fair use" is fairly incontrovertible. But... let's say we're dealing with the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the much-discussed photo thereof; assume it's tagged as fair use.
Even if would be fair use to use this to illustrate an article on the [[Lindisfarne Gospels]] (rare item, not much photographed, &c.) despite it being copyrighted... would it be fair use to use it to illustrate an article on, say, [[Rare-book photography]]? Sure, it's an example of such an image, but there's certainly thousands more of equal usability. How about using it to illustrate an article on [[Books]], or the [[Bible]]? Again, some relevance, but other images are just as good or better.
As I understand fair use - I don't claim to, one set of copyright law is confusing enough - it is quite dependent on the claim being a reasonable one in context.
But we'd have the one image, tagged as {{fairuse}} without that context; anyone wondering about using it in another article would simply see that we had it, it was under a legitimate-use license of some form, and slap it in their article, unless they were the introspective type given to considering license details.
This may, potentially, be a problem with the way we tag things - fair use inherently seems to imply "in the context of the article for which it was originally used". It may be fair use the second time (and probably is), but may not... I don't know what, if anything, to do about this, but thought I'd kick it out.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
An intrepid (anonymous) reader of this e-mailed me to say that tehre was such a template, {{fairusein}}.
I think perhaps though that this should be required for ANY fair use tag -- every use must be judged fair on different grounds.
Example:
[[Image:Carrie_Buck.jpg]] is used in two articles: [[Carrie Buck]] and [[Buck v. Bell]]. I think it is fair use in both contexts, though they have separate purpose (in one it illustrates the main subject of a biographical article, in another it is illustrating a plaintiff in a court case. Such dual-fair use should be made explicit; it would not be necessarily fair use on any other page. Under my proposal, it would contain two separate fair use notices, one for each page it was used on.
At the moment I'm seriously thinking of endeavoring on an larger project of fair use reform -- really getting serious about explicit fair use tagging and reviewing and things like that, making things a bit easier to understand for the many users who want to upload content but don't really want to take the time to learn U.S. intellectual property law (the basics of which are much simpler than they have a reputation for being, but as such is still not very interesting to most) . Anybody interested? Good idea, bad idea, waste of time?
FF
On 7/11/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
I think these are good comments. One way around this might be to make fair use tags require article names, i.e., {{fairuse|Article}}, which would then start off by saying, "This page is copyrighted etc. but thought to be fair use on the article {{article}}..."
FF
On 7/10/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/07/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Postscript:
I also think it would be a good idea to create a template along the lines of {{fairuse-reviewed}} which would contain the normal fair use notice, as well as something like "The fair use criteria of this item has been reviewed and found satisfactory by at least one other user." or something like that. The process of reviewing fair use images would then be one of converting {{fairuse}} tags to {{fairuse-reviewed}} (after they had been reviewed). Perhaps a Wikiproject of some form would be good for this? Anyway, it would allow us to keep track of things. Just a thought.
I like this idea; might need a lot of manpower, though, and people do tend to have rather wide-ranging differences in how stringently they accept copyright restrictions. (I've more than once heard "well, it *should* be free" used to defend copyvios, and in one delightful case encountered someone who thought "in the public domain" meant *both* "this information is not secret" and "this information is free to copy"...). But I'd certainly be interested in seeing it work.
One fair-use problem, that I've been mulling over of late (I've been incommunicado for a few days), is that of context.
With something like a publicity photo of $celebrity, "fair use" is fairly incontrovertible. But... let's say we're dealing with the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the much-discussed photo thereof; assume it's tagged as fair use.
Even if would be fair use to use this to illustrate an article on the [[Lindisfarne Gospels]] (rare item, not much photographed, &c.) despite it being copyrighted... would it be fair use to use it to illustrate an article on, say, [[Rare-book photography]]? Sure, it's an example of such an image, but there's certainly thousands more of equal usability. How about using it to illustrate an article on [[Books]], or the [[Bible]]? Again, some relevance, but other images are just as good or better.
As I understand fair use - I don't claim to, one set of copyright law is confusing enough - it is quite dependent on the claim being a reasonable one in context.
But we'd have the one image, tagged as {{fairuse}} without that context; anyone wondering about using it in another article would simply see that we had it, it was under a legitimate-use license of some form, and slap it in their article, unless they were the introspective type given to considering license details.
This may, potentially, be a problem with the way we tag things - fair use inherently seems to imply "in the context of the article for which it was originally used". It may be fair use the second time (and probably is), but may not... I don't know what, if anything, to do about this, but thought I'd kick it out.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
At the moment I'm seriously thinking of endeavoring on an larger project of fair use reform -- really getting serious about explicit fair use tagging and reviewing and things like that, making things a bit easier to understand for the many users who want to upload content but don't really want to take the time to learn U.S. intellectual property law (the basics of which are much simpler than they have a reputation for being, but as such is still not very interesting to most). Anybody interested? Good idea, bad idea, waste of time?
Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you :) And new untagged images are still being added. I just came upon this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Holler.jpg
Earlier today this had no licensing information. I added {{albumcover}} and {{fairusein|Holler}}.
Your plan is a worthy one.
Regards, Haukur
On 11/07/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote: :
[[Image:Carrie_Buck.jpg]] is used in two articles: [[Carrie Buck]] and [[Buck v. Bell]]. I think it is fair use in both contexts, though they have separate purpose (in one it illustrates the main subject of a biographical article, in another it is illustrating a plaintiff in a court case. Such dual-fair use should be made explicit; it would not be necessarily fair use on any other page. Under my proposal, it would contain two separate fair use notices, one for each page it was used on.
Here's another I've just run across. [[Image:Teutonic_order_charge.jpg]] is a (cropped, I believe) version of the front of a box of miniatures. It's been tagged {{Gamecover}}, which is a bit flaky but I can live with.
But it's got a fair-use claim on it now - "it's fair use since it came from a game box" - and so has been used in two different articles, [[Teutonic Knights]] and [[Battle of Grunwald]]. Some poking around finds that the artist himself is still selling prints of the image.
I'm fairly sure this claim wouldn't hold up - we're not using the image to illustrate anything about the material it was used with, there's no critical reason to use this not another image, &c &c.
Yet {{gamecover}} (and {{bookcover}}) are pretty much poster-boy examples of fair use claims. How many images do we have filed away that are like this, *sections* of a book cover, used irrelevantly to the book, but tagged fair use?
It's a good exception, and I'm pleased we're making use of it for all the many images we'd otherwise have to neglect, but it hides a multitude of reasonable-sounding but logically problematic usages. Perhaps the use of "this image is fair use due to being of type X" templates is a possible problem here? It's safe to say that using a book cover when discussing the book is fair use; it's certainly not safe to say that an image on a book cover is thereby inherently fair use.
Your proposal to start auditing through them has a lot of merit, I think. We have maybe 200-250ish {{book cover}}s, and pushing a thousand {{gamecover}}; a lot of work, there.
Any more thoughts since you last posted on it?
On 7/15/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Here's another I've just run across. [[Image:Teutonic_order_charge.jpg]] is a (cropped, I believe) version of the front of a box of miniatures. It's been tagged {{Gamecover}}, which is a bit flaky but I can live with.
The artist who painted Teutonic_order_charge.jpg wrote to me about this. He asked to be credited on [[Teutonic Knights]] which seemed a fair request since other painters were linked in the image captions on that page, but the image is now used in [[Battle of Grunwald]] as well with no attempt to justify whether its use there is fair or not and no credit given to the artist.
Image descriptions pages should really explain which articles they are fair use in, and why. Being on a box cover doesn't automatically make an image fair use for every article. Perhaps extending the use of {{verifieduse}} would help?
Angela.