Jorge Oliva wrote to helpdesk-l:
To whom it may concern:
I am a student at Westwood College in Los Angeles trying to get a bachelor degree in Video Game Art and Design. We were told to do a poster in one of our favorite video games. I chose to do it in the diffrence between StreetFighter, and I would like to ask for permision to borrow some of the pictures that are in your website. This poster would be only used for educational purposes.
This is where allowing "Fair use" images is getting us... what do I tell them? "Sorry, that's actually a copyright infringment which we can use via a legal loophole, but nobody else is allowed to"?
I thought the idea was to allow "maximal reuse" and "free content", not "copyright situations so complicated that nobody can understand them"!
On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 14:30 +1030, Alphax wrote:
This is where allowing "Fair use" images is getting us... what do I tell them? "Sorry, that's actually a copyright infringment which we can use via a legal loophole, but nobody else is allowed to"?
I thought the idea was to allow "maximal reuse" and "free content", not "copyright situations so complicated that nobody can understand them"!
It's not really a "legal loophole," per se; it's a group of restrictions upon copyright law. That said, I agree with your point. Having totally Free content on Wikipedia would be great. But, reality seldom conforms to ideals. As long as the vast majority of the world's content producers adhere to restrictive copyright schemes, it's either fair use or no use at all. I, personally, would rather have non-redistributable content than none at all, at least for illuminative purposes.
Of course, reasonable fair use is necessary. Authors who think Wikipedia needs images of every single character in a work, no matter how minor, are obviously overstepping the bounds of fair use. And yes, fair use does complicate our situation somewhat. I think the benefits of responsible fair use outweigh the downsides, however. And remember, there will always be people uninformed about copyright or Wikipedia in general asking if they can do this or that. We do have Wikipedia: pages for explanations.
On 11/8/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
This is where allowing "Fair use" images is getting us... what do I tell them? "Sorry, that's actually a copyright infringment which we can use via a legal loophole, but nobody else is allowed to"?
They are not a copyright infringement and it is not a legal loophole. It is, rather, a sensible limit to the extent of copyright protection, which is not an absolute right and is not 'intellectual property'.
What we should tell him is that we use those pictures under the United States doctrine of Fair Use and that we cannot give any permissions, since we do not own the copyrights ourselves. He must either obtain permission from the copyright holder or make his own determination as to whether Fair Use is applicable to his situation.
There is a strong argument that those concerned with freedom should aggressively use the provisions of Fair Use - explicitly to never allow the fiction that copyright owners have absolute control to establish itself. Fair Use is equivalent to a public right of way, in a sense - and should not be a right allowed to lapse through unuse.
-Matt (User:Morven)
On 9 Nov 2005, at 04:40, Matt Brown wrote:
There is a strong argument that those concerned with freedom should aggressively use the provisions of Fair Use - explicitly to never allow the fiction that copyright owners have absolute control to establish itself. Fair Use is equivalent to a public right of way, in a sense - and should not be a right allowed to lapse through unuse.
I think creating free content is much more subversive.
Justinc
On 11/9/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
I think creating free content is much more subversive.
Does the one preclude the other?
-Matt
On 9 Nov 2005, at 19:34, Matt Brown wrote:
On 11/9/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
I think creating free content is much more subversive.
Does the one preclude the other?
Yes to a large extent. eg see Jimbo's comments on his talk page about his friend who is taking free pictures of baseball players:
"But my very good friend Terry spends a lot of his spare time going to baseball games to take photos of baseball players for us, and he finds it disheartening that many of the photos he is taking aren't adding to wikipedia except in the narrow sense of improving things from a "fair use" to "GFDL" standpoint. He's prefer to be known as the hero who went to baseball games year in and year out to get hundreds of photos for Wikipedia for article which would have otherwise been bare."
Justinc
Good point. I also have had several ... not-quite-fights ... with users who either attempt to replace free-licensed pictures with supposedly 'better' "fair use" pictures, or who object to my removing a fair-use picture in favor of a free one. They complain that the free ones look 'amateurish' because they're not studio shots.
-Matt
Matt Brown wrote:
Good point. I also have had several ... not-quite-fights ... with users who either attempt to replace free-licensed pictures with supposedly 'better' "fair use" pictures, or who object to my removing a fair-use picture in favor of a free one. They complain that the free ones look 'amateurish' because they're not studio shots.
That /is/ a valid argument, you have to admit. Aspiring to be a serious encyclopedia project, many of our contributors feel that the quality not only of the text but also of the pictures is a more important goal than some obscure (in their mind, not mine) copyright concern. As long as "fair use" means "we can use it legally", to most people it meets that goal better than an inferior-quality image with free licensing does.
The primary reason we want freely-licensed images is not because they're more beautiful but because they make our content as a whole more reusable. So maybe there should be a feature whereby an article can have two images, but if you visit wikipedia.org you will only see the better-quality-but-fair-use one, while the database dumps will contain only the ugly-but-freely-licensed one.
Obviously, there will be varying opinions on how this should be designed and implemented, so it's probably not going to get done.
Timwi
On 11 Nov 2005, at 17:50, Timwi wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
Good point. I also have had several ... not-quite-fights ... with users who either attempt to replace free-licensed pictures with supposedly 'better' "fair use" pictures, or who object to my removing a fair-use picture in favor of a free one. They complain that the free ones look 'amateurish' because they're not studio shots.
That /is/ a valid argument, you have to admit. Aspiring to be a serious encyclopedia project, many of our contributors feel that the quality not only of the text but also of the pictures is a more important goal than some obscure (in their mind, not mine) copyright concern. As long as "fair use" means "we can use it legally", to most people it meets that goal better than an inferior- quality image with free licensing does.
The primary reason we want freely-licensed images is not because they're more beautiful but because they make our content as a whole more reusable. So maybe there should be a feature whereby an article can have two images, but if you visit wikipedia.org you will only see the better-quality-but-fair-use one, while the database dumps will contain only the ugly-but-freely-licensed one.
Obviously, there will be varying opinions on how this should be designed and implemented, so it's probably not going to get done.
Well I have vaguely suggested having a server like commons called non- free; an addition to mediawiki that removed the image links to this completely for mirrors/based on config would work. Also has the advantage that non free images arent in the normal dumps.
Justinc
Matt Brown wrote:
Good point. I also have had several ... not-quite-fights ... with users who either attempt to replace free-licensed pictures with supposedly 'better' "fair use" pictures, or who object to my removing a fair-use picture in favor of a free one. They complain that the free ones look 'amateurish' because they're not studio shots.
Then I think that you and I are in total agreement on this issue. :-)
Fair use is a good legal doctrine. It says "look here, the extent of copyright has limits". We should support that and rely on it as needed.
We should also reward people emotionally for doing great original work and releasing it for free.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Matt Brown wrote:
Good point. I also have had several ... not-quite-fights ... with users who either attempt to replace free-licensed pictures with supposedly 'better' "fair use" pictures, or who object to my removing a fair-use picture in favor of a free one. They complain that the free ones look 'amateurish' because they're not studio shots.
Then I think that you and I are in total agreement on this issue. :-)
Fair use is a good legal doctrine. It says "look here, the extent of copyright has limits". We should support that and rely on it as needed.
We should also reward people emotionally for doing great original work and releasing it for free.
cf. The Photographer's Barnstar.
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Matt Brown stated for the record:
There is a strong argument that those concerned with freedom should aggressively use the provisions of Fair Use - explicitly to never allow the fiction that copyright owners have absolute control to establish itself. Fair Use is equivalent to a public right of way, in a sense - and should not be a right allowed to lapse through unuse.
-Matt (User:Morven)
An argument promoted all the more strongly since its supporters won't have to pay any of the shattering price of making it. "You should accept the risk that a crippling lawsuit will destroy your project while I sit over here and cheer you on."
- -- Sean Barrett | Videmus nunc per speculum in sean@epoptic.org | aenigmate. Nunc cognosco ex parte.
Matt Brown wrote:
There is a strong argument that those concerned with freedom should aggressively use the provisions of Fair Use - explicitly to never allow the fiction that copyright owners have absolute control to establish itself. Fair Use is equivalent to a public right of way, in a sense - and should not be a right allowed to lapse through unuse.
I have great sympathy for this argument, of course. But I also have great sympathy for the argument that relying too easily on fair use (no matter how justified it may be in a given situation) is discouraging to people who are trying to provide free alternatives.
Terry Foote (who works in the office with me) loves baseball. He goes to a lot of baseball games and takes pictures of players. He then puts those photos into Wikipedia. A great hobby, a great thing to do.
It's always a little disappointing to him, though, when he goes to put in a photo and sees a "fair use" photo already there. He'd like for his work to be making Wikipedia a lot better, and of course it *does*.
There are many cases like this, in my opinion, where we are currently relying on (perfectly valid) fair use claims, but in which those photos are discouraging people from developing alternatives.
This is a balancing act.
--Jimbo
Two comments, hopefully not already made:
1. This copyright situation is not that hard to understand. You can tell these guys that the copyright is likely held by Capcom, but that we use it without permission under the "Fair Use" clause in U.S. copyright law. They should be able to determine if their use of it would also be "fair use" as well. Since they are doing it for an art project (basically their own private use), it's probably fine. Or they could contact Capcom and ask permission, which will probably be granted if they emphasize that this won't be displayed outside of one classroom.
2. It *is* a loophole in a sense, though. I've been somewhat fretting about this for awhile and not sure where I stand on it. Here's my argument:
A. Wikipedia is not supposed to have Wikipedia-only or encyclopedia-only or non-profit-only media. B. But we allow Fair Use media. C. But most of our legitimate Fair Use claims rides on the fact that we are a non-profit encyclopedia. D. So we end up allowing a lot of things which are unlikely to be usable except in non-profit contexts. E. Which seems to contradict A.
Now Fair Use is a bit more than just not-for-profit, of course -- that's just one point in the equation. But in the end the law *is* skewed to allow that sort of use over for-profit, commercial, non-critical, non-encyclopedic use. So by deferring to a law which trends towards non-profit use, and taking advantage of the fact that we are non-profit and an encyclopedia, we end up having a huge amount of media which is de facto non-profit only.
Maybe I've gotten tripped up here at some point, which I'd be glad to see pointed out. I feel that our Fair Use policy ends up being very much neither in the letter or the spirit of Jimbo's fatwa against non-commercial only images. Perhaps I worry too much, though.
FF
On 11/8/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Jorge Oliva wrote to helpdesk-l:
To whom it may concern:
I am a student at Westwood College in Los Angeles trying to get a bachelor degree in Video Game Art and Design. We were told to do a poster in one of our favorite video games. I chose to do it in the diffrence between StreetFighter, and I would like to ask for permision to borrow some of the pictures that are in your website. This poster would be only used for educational purposes.
This is where allowing "Fair use" images is getting us... what do I tell them? "Sorry, that's actually a copyright infringment which we can use via a legal loophole, but nobody else is allowed to"?
I thought the idea was to allow "maximal reuse" and "free content", not "copyright situations so complicated that nobody can understand them"!
-- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Fastfission wrote:
- It *is* a loophole in a sense, though. I've been somewhat fretting
about this for awhile and not sure where I stand on it. Here's my argument:
A. Wikipedia is not supposed to have Wikipedia-only or encyclopedia-only or non-profit-only media. B. But we allow Fair Use media. C. But most of our legitimate Fair Use claims rides on the fact that we are a non-profit encyclopedia. D. So we end up allowing a lot of things which are unlikely to be usable except in non-profit contexts. E. Which seems to contradict A.
I don't think most of our fair use claims rely on C., that we're a non-profit encyclopedia. They rely primarily on the fact that we are an encyclopedia, and using them for informational purposes. I think a for-profit encyclopedia could also make use of most of them for the same reasons---for example, Britannica is probably well within their fair-use rights to illustrate their encyclopedia article on "Super Mario World" with a screenshot from the game.
The major difficulty would come if people tried to reuse the content in some form that made it no longer primarily informational/educational; if they simply distributed Wikipedia articles as is for profit, there's unlikely to be an issue.
-Mark
On 11/12/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I don't think most of our fair use claims rely on C., that we're a non-profit encyclopedia. They rely primarily on the fact that we are an encyclopedia, and using them for informational purposes. I think a for-profit encyclopedia could also make use of most of them for the same reasons---for example, Britannica is probably well within their fair-use rights to illustrate their encyclopedia article on "Super Mario World" with a screenshot from the game.
The major difficulty would come if people tried to reuse the content in some form that made it no longer primarily informational/educational; if they simply distributed Wikipedia articles as is for profit, there's unlikely to be an issue.
Well, I was under the impression that restricting downstream use to informational/educational use was too restrictive for Wikipedia's goals, so I'm not sure your argument changes anything in the end.
Even in a weaker interpretation, the argument still seems to imply that this policy places part of our project explicitly in a legal position which benefits non-for-profit and educational use in a disproportionate manner than it would for-profit and commercial use. I'm not sure whether this is compatible or not with Jimbo's feelings on re-use restrictions, though I imagine it likely comes down to how disproportionate one interprets this difference to be. I don't think there's any strong argument to say that such a difference does not exist, though -- it is just a question of how much the difference is.
FF
Fastfission wrote:
On 11/12/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I don't think most of our fair use claims rely on C., that we're a non-profit encyclopedia. They rely primarily on the fact that we are an encyclopedia, and using them for informational purposes. I think a for-profit encyclopedia could also make use of most of them for the same reasons---for example, Britannica is probably well within their fair-use rights to illustrate their encyclopedia article on "Super Mario World" with a screenshot from the game.
The major difficulty would come if people tried to reuse the content in some form that made it no longer primarily informational/educational; if they simply distributed Wikipedia articles as is for profit, there's unlikely to be an issue.
Well, I was under the impression that restricting downstream use to informational/educational use was too restrictive for Wikipedia's goals, so I'm not sure your argument changes anything in the end.
Even in a weaker interpretation, the argument still seems to imply that this policy places part of our project explicitly in a legal position which benefits non-for-profit and educational use in a disproportionate manner than it would for-profit and commercial use. I'm not sure whether this is compatible or not with Jimbo's feelings on re-use restrictions, though I imagine it likely comes down to how disproportionate one interprets this difference to be. I don't think there's any strong argument to say that such a difference does not exist, though -- it is just a question of how much the difference is.
This is all still only one of the four factors in fair use. If we use a fair use image our obligation to the downstream user is to let him know that we are invoking fair use. That forwarns him of possible problems. A for-profit downstream user has a responsibility to do his own due dilligence. It would be completely irresponsible for him to say in court that he used because Wikipedia said it was fair use. We are not in a position to indemnify every downstream user that copies material from Wikipedia. There are too many potential variables.. If someone successfully sues a downstream re-user for something that he took from our site it may simply be because the copyright owner never saw it on our site. It may be that we recgnized and fied the problem when the owner informed us, while our downstream user decided that this was the time to be stubborn about it.
Ec
On 11/16/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
This is all still only one of the four factors in fair use. If we use a fair use image our obligation to the downstream user is to let him know that we are invoking fair use. That forwarns him of possible problems. A for-profit downstream user has a responsibility to do his own due dilligence. It would be completely irresponsible for him to say in court that he used because Wikipedia said it was fair use.
I think you're missing my point, which is that the "possible problems" warning is basically something which says, "If you use this file in any way which is not educational/not-for-profit/encyclopedic, you might be committing a copyright violation." It's a very strong limitation on re-use. And it only applies in the USA, but that's another question alltogether.
*We're* not imposing that restriction, of course. It's built into the law, which favors our sort of usage over most others. However, if we use a considerable amount of content under that clause, we end up creating not an encyclopedic built on free content, but one based on educational-only content, even if it is not any particular license which says that. It is a de-facto limitation. The use of "fair use" media will mean that we are never truly creating a truly "free" encyclopedia -- we're creating one that will have to be filtered through carefully if is ported to for-profit contexts.
My argument isn't one about people getting sued in court -- it's one about people not being able ot use our content. It's about someone looking at it and saying, "Gee, I guess I can't use this photograph, since I'm not using it in an educational context." Which was a usage situation which I thought was more restrictive than we wanted to impose (even if we are imposing it implicitly rather than explicitly).
FF
Fastfission wrote:
On 11/16/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
This is all still only one of the four factors in fair use. If we use a fair use image our obligation to the downstream user is to let him know that we are invoking fair use. That forwarns him of possible problems. A for-profit downstream user has a responsibility to do his own due dilligence. It would be completely irresponsible for him to say in court that he used because Wikipedia said it was fair use.
I think you're missing my point, which is that the "possible problems" warning is basically something which says, "If you use this file in any way which is not educational/not-for-profit/encyclopedic, you might be committing a copyright violation." It's a very strong limitation on re-use. And it only applies in the USA, but that's another question alltogether.
Certainty in many cases will remain unattainable. If a fair use image can be replaced by an acceptable free one we do better to replacxe it. I don't think that will always be possible. A warning is only an alternative solution.
*We're* not imposing that restriction, of course. It's built into the law, which favors our sort of usage over most others. However, if we use a considerable amount of content under that clause, we end up creating not an encyclopedic built on free content, but one based on educational-only content, even if it is not any particular license which says that. It is a de-facto limitation. The use of "fair use" media will mean that we are never truly creating a truly "free" encyclopedia -- we're creating one that will have to be filtered through carefully if is ported to for-profit contexts.
There is no single criterion for how much is too much.
My argument isn't one about people getting sued in court -- it's one about people not being able ot use our content. It's about someone looking at it and saying, "Gee, I guess I can't use this photograph, since I'm not using it in an educational context." Which was a usage situation which I thought was more restrictive than we wanted to impose (even if we are imposing it implicitly rather than explicitly).
Maybe I'm just not as worried about the downstream users as you.
Ec
On 11/19/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Maybe I'm just not as worried about the downstream users as you.
It's not "me" who cares about whether or not "educational-use only" restrictions harm downstream use. Honestly, if it were up to me alone I'd probably allow non-profit and educational-use only images. But like many things it is probably best that it is not up to me.
My argument was in relation to pre-existing policies -- and fairly electric-fence ones at that -- which require content re-usability to include commercial and non-educational usage. If we are going to take those policies seriously, and the ideals that stand behind them seriously, I think questioning whether our invocations "fair use" is within the spirit of that ideal is somewhat overdue.
FF