Jeff V. Merkey wrote:
We should act in good faith always. Good faith means if someone creates a "cloud of doubt" and they are an undisputed owner of the materials in question, a good faith action would be to remove it.
" your honor, we always strive to act in good faith in all situations, and in the present case, we were notified the materials may have been copyrighted and removed them immediately IAW with our policies. Given our actions in good faith, we cannot be held liable as the other side claims since we are simply a third party interactive web service and we have complied with the DMCA at all times ..."
:-)
Jeff
Unfortunately in this case, official policy is that we are simply grabbing content and claiming fair use. We know these are copyrighted images, and yet we are permitting their use on Wikipedia openly, even though we also know that we don't have any sort of permission to do so.
There are some items such as trademarks, bank notes, government seals, ect. that I feel are justified in terms of fair use. I just don't think that nearly everything that currently is being claimed for fair use fits the same rationale. The question here is where to draw the line, and I see at the moment that the current line is to the point that nearly everything that could be claimed under fair use, including overt usage of the non-commercial nature of Wikipedia and the educational mission of the WMF as justification to keep the content. It is for this reason that I question how the copyvio template could even legitimately be used on an image, except if it were redundant or of somebody or something non-notable on Wikipedia.