"Is it fair use?" is not the relevant question for inclusion, as Gerard pointed out very well. Our license requires that our content be reusable for any purpose, including commercial, and fair use content damages that goal. Therefore, the policy is that non-free content is prohibited, except when the content is essential and no free alternative is available and it meets US fair use requirements.
Nathan
On Jan 7, 2008 1:24 PM, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
It may be worthwhile for all involved to review fair use under American law http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html - the most relevant point is probably "quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment" which covers almost everything that's legitimate under Wikipedia's policies on what's allowable - obviously violations occur.
Of course, I say this as a private citizen living in Canada, and as such someone who's essentially incapable of violating copyright laws. Your mileage may vary.
Cheers WilyD
On Jan 7, 2008 1:06 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
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)
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