If there is no freely licensed substitute, I think we have in the long run justr to accept that, and work with substitutes of minor quality. Thats just bad luck, but a direct consequence of what we are doing. That is a consequence of our choise for freedom, for free licenses. How can you EVER expect a photographer, national institutes, record labels, to license their stuff freely when even *we* refuse to use the free versions of lower quality, and use copyrighted content under the flag of fair use?
I think snowdog made an excellent point in this discussion. NC is more free as Fair Use. So a direct consequence would be that NC should be allowed on Wikipedia. Even educational use only is more free. So if we choose for fair use in the long run, we have to be fair ourselves, and accept those as well. (To be clear: I am totally against allowing either NC, either educational-only either fair use). It just might very well be that the GFDL is worthless then, and when people are talking about throwing out our principles, what is more our principle then free licences?
Lodewijk
2007/1/13, Marco Chiesa chiesa.marco@gmail.com:
On 1/13/07, David Strauss david@fourkitchens.com wrote:
Allowing fair use is not an issue of convenience. There are some items that will not be available in any free form until their copyrights expire that also have no substitutes. We cannot simply refuse to use such items when we need them to discuss a topic.
You see, this exactly the very reason why on it.wikipedia non free licenses are allowed, i.e. because there are things that cannot be illustrated with free images because the copyright on these images is all they're worth to their owner. Fair use is one (legitimate, IMHO) way of going round this, asking for permission to use the same thing is another, where you have the added bonus that the copyright owner has agreed so she cannot sue you for copyright violation. Unfortunately, not all legislations allow fair use in the same way (newspapers have a wider access to "diritto di cronaca" - right to tell, which is quite similar to fair use to me).
For example, if an article discusses the controversy between Apple's
Sherlock and the competing program Watson, it's necessary to invoke fair use to illustrate the differences through screenshots. Even the most descriptive prose cannot suffice when the topic is the visual looks of the user interfaces.
I agree, but this does not make those images free.
Marco aka Cruccone _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l