Thomas Dalton writes:
That said, even what is permitted by law seems to be more restrictive than what is currently occurring on the English Wikipedia.
Really? If that's the case, then Mike needs to step in and tell us. If our use of images is actually illegal (or, could reasonably be considered illegal - I don't think fair use is sufficiently well defined to be sure until a judge makes a decision), then all our debate is meaningless and we just have to do what the law requires.
One of the hard things about dealing with copyright law is that people who want to work within the law want clear answers, stated as blanket rules, and the law itself doesn't lend itself either to particularly clear answers or to easily applied general rules.
RIAA, for example, has a very narrow notion of fair use. YouTube has a very broad one. The nice thing for YouTube is that they're backed by Google, so can afford to very aggressive in urging for an expansive understanding of fair use, either by simply allowing lots of unlicensed uses of content or by defending its use aggressively in court or both.
The Foundation is not well-positioned to do the latter, so it seems prudent not to do the former either. That said, I wouldn't want us to avoid Being Bold altogether. But I think we have to ask ourselves, every time we use content that has not been freely licensed, is this something we're ready to *pay* to go court over?
This is a different question from asking whether we'd win any given case. I assume without much uncertainty that we'd win a fair number of them -- in theory. But we're not in the position of going to court to win even the cherrypicked, obviously winnable cases.
Maybe someday we will be -- either because we have a better revenue stream or because we're doing so in coalition with other like-minded projects (the first is likelier than the second, in my view, because coalitions tend to work defensively better than offensively). But in the meantime, anyone who's adding "fair use" content needs to ask himself or herself the hard questions about willingness to go to court (or willingness to make the Foundation go to court for them).
There's plenty of other pressing legal work that needs to be done on the Foundation's behalf that I can't say I would love to spend my days in court defending a "fair use" on anything but the solidest legal ground, and without a whole lot of money in the Foundation's pockets to spend on getting the case right. So ... it's reasonable to conclude that a conservative policy is best for now. (I liked Nathan's one-paragraph summary of it a little while ago.)
--Mike
Message: 8 Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2008 19:06:49 +0100 From: "Gerard Meijssen" gerard.meijssen@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fair use being badly abused on en.wikipedia To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 41a006820801071006y2e6d30f3tfa8e5444f25a4279@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Hoi, Your aim is different from the stated aim of producing a product that is freely licensed and everything to its content is permitted as per the license. Both the GFDL and the CC-by-sa explicitly allow for the commercial application of our products. This is stated policy and when fair use is incompatible with this purpose, fair use is not defendable. Thanks, GerardM
On Jan 7, 2008 6:19 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
Some people, myself included, want to create the best possible no- cost encyclopedia. From that point of view, copyleft and free content is a means to that end.
Other people (including much of the WMF Board apparently) feel creating free content is an end in itself that justifies sacrificing some encyclopedic coverage and limiting our exercise of fair use rights to a much narrower set of circumstances than allowed by law.
I can understand that point of view, even though I don't agree with it.
However, I do think we need a different set of language here. Despite the title of this thread, there is a NOT an abuse of fair use here. The situation being described is exactly the kind of situation for which fair use rights were created, e.g. identifying subjects of academic discussion in a non-commercial, non-competitve setting.
It is, arguably, an abuse of non-free content under Wikipedia/ Wikimedia policy, but abusing non-free content with respect to Wikipedia is very different than abusing fair use.
That said, policy is the creation of Wikipedians/Wikimedians. It evolves with time and often has fuzzy edges. It's limits are, more or less, whatever it is that we agree to enforce. Appeals to absolutes like "if you truly care about free content, we must limit fair use usage" is not very helpful, since we already do limit fair use quite substantially, both in policy and in practice.
-Robert A. Rohde
On Jan 7, 2008 8:01 AM, Brian Hammer hammersoft123@gmail.com wrote:
The mission of Wikimedia is to generate "neutral educational content
under
a free content license". The Foundation's resolution from March 2007
states
that EDP use must be minimal, within narrow limits.
Subsequent to the resolution being passed, a number of efforts were undertaken to limit fair use usage on en.wikipedia. This affected discographies, episode lists, and character lists. A *huge* number of debates erupted over these removals. One such debate was covered at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-05-07/Fair_us...
. The disputes have never ended. For discographies and episode lists, the debate has simmered down for the most part, with occasional flare ups.
For
character lists, the debate is still raging.
What has been the rule of thumb in removing the images is that an image
of
the character being used for depiction of that character only is
allowable
on that character's particular article, but not on articles collecting multiple characters into a single article. The rationale here is that if
a
character is notable enough for an article, they're notable enough for
an
image, and vice versa. Allowances have been made for "cast" type images showing multiple characters in a single image from the copyright holder (not montages made by editors).
Nevertheless, the debate has raged endlessly, and has recently exploded. It stands now on a precipice, and it is highly likely that fair use inclusionists will 'win' in that per-character images are going to be permitted on character articles (for example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogwarts_students ).
Some discussion exists currently at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Fair_us...
and scattered through a variety of sections of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Non-free_content
If Wikipedia is truly a free content encyclopedia, if you truly care
about
free content, we must limit fair use usage per the Foundation's resolution. As it stands now, this debate is lost in favor of people who are more focused on whether something is suitable as a guide than focused on
being
a free content resource.
A strong voice from the Foundation would be appreciated, most especially in favor of a new section added to clarify the local EDP at the second paragraph of this version of the guideline:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Non-free_content&old...
(paragraph since removed in an edit war)
Thank you, Hammersoft _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ foundation-l
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Message: 9 Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2008 13:48:20 +0100 From: "Milos Rancic" millosh@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Meta-arbcom (was: the foundations of...) To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 846221520801070448q1b05bce1r98f4eeeb86171c4e@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On 1/5/08, FloNight sydney.poore@gmail.com wrote:
I was thinking of a combination of stewards and members from elected ArbComs.
Maybe someone else mentioned it before. I am at the first fifth of the thread...
(As a steward) I don't think that stewards should have any connections with judicial functions. Stewards are executors (let's say, like FBI) and giving them possibility to make decisions over disputes clearly makes SuperWikimedian group of people.
Also, while I really think that a lot of stewards are able to make good decisions over disputes, in choosing the main factor is not a quality of such decisions, but a quality in imposing the rules.
Another problem is the process of electing stewards and removing their rights. While it is completely acceptable that stewards don't need reelection, but only confirmation -- Meta ArbCom members has to be reelected. Life-long (or practically life-long) position of a judge may be acceptable only in a well developed societies and WM society is not well developed; as well as it needs a process of education in law.
By giving to stewards a new role, we would make a retroactive rule: all people who are chosen for one role are getting another another, qualitatively different role.
The point is that this is a really bad idea. There are many of structural problems made by giving to stewards judicial role.
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End of foundation-l Digest, Vol 46, Issue 46