Greg said:
The ESA has chosen a copyright policy which limits the freedom the world can take with work, presumably they have good reasons for this, but their decisions have negative consequences as well. One of those negative consequences is a reduction in how widespread information of their work can travel, and Wikipedia is just a single symptom of that.
Fine with me, but the same is true of museums or heirs of artists who chose not to allow free reproductions of their works of art.
There cannot be two rules, two measures. One of the negative consequences, for an artist, the heirs thereof, or museums or libraries or whatever owning rights to the works, of not allowing free photographs, is to reduce exposure of these works to the world, and thus deprive themselves of a kind of advertisement on a site in the first pages of Google. They'll have to assume that.
Thus, again: Why that exemption for so-called "modern art"?
On 2/8/07, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote:
Greg said:
The ESA has chosen a copyright policy which limits the freedom the world can take with work, presumably they have good reasons for this, but their decisions have negative consequences as well. One of those negative consequences is a reduction in how widespread information of their work can travel, and Wikipedia is just a single symptom of that.
Fine with me, but the same is true of museums or heirs of artists who chose not to allow free reproductions of their works of art.
There cannot be two rules, two measures. One of the negative consequences, for an artist, the heirs thereof, or museums or libraries or whatever owning rights to the works, of not allowing free photographs, is to reduce exposure of these works to the world, and thus deprive themselves of a kind of advertisement on a site in the first pages of Google. They'll have to assume that.
Thus, again: Why that exemption for so-called "modern art"?
We can, as fair use, use images of a copyrighted work to discuss the copyrighted work so long as we're not going to get a free image and of course such images don't belong on commons.
So for example, I don't see why we couldn't use the Giotto mission's image of the Halley Comet on the article about the [[Giotto mission]], because an image of it's copyrighted output is important to understand its mission.. But we should probably not use the same image on [[Halley's Comet]], since NASA provides many free images.
Incidentally, while looking for an example for my reply I noticed that may enwiki articles for ESA subjects have free images. For example take a look at [[ERS-1]]. After seeing all these I really wonder if we haven't been misthinking our approach to ESA images.
David Monniaux wrote:
Fine with me, but the same is true of museums or heirs of artists who chose not to allow free reproductions of their works of art.
There cannot be two rules, two measures. One of the negative consequences, for an artist, the heirs thereof, or museums or libraries or whatever owning rights to the works, of not allowing free photographs, is to reduce exposure of these works to the world, and thus deprive themselves of a kind of advertisement on a site in the first pages of Google. They'll have to assume that.
Thus, again: Why that exemption for so-called "modern art"?
I don't understand this one either. To me, reproductions of 2D art, especially when it is the entire artwork that is reproduced even in reduced resolution, essentially reproduced the entire artwork. The only legitimate "fair-use" example I have seen for this that has been accepted in U.S. common law is for a thumbnail gallery, such as is done on google images. And even then it is to provide a link to content that appears elsewhere that is legal to use. Usage of this kind of content in a Wikipedia article just doesn't seem to fit the same sort of criteria, and requires multiple clicks to get to the "original" image and information about the actual copyright owner of the photo.
And trying to decide what a notable or significant artwork might be seems to smack with the same problems that plagues Wikipedia in terms of notability of people. The one argument I've seen made regarding notable people being listed on Wikipedia is that as Wikipedia grows, people who would not have been considered notable when Wikipedia only had 100,000 articles can be considered marginally notable with 1.5 million articles. Does the same logic apply here for notable works of art? That eventually there will be no line drawn as to notability? And notable in what community or setting?
To me, this seems to be a rationalization of copyright violation rather than a serious attempt to try and find a legitimate fair use application.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
To me, reproductions of 2D art, especially when it is the entire artwork that is reproduced even in reduced resolution, essentially reproduced the entire artwork. The only legitimate "fair-use" example I have seen for this that has been accepted in U.S. common law is for a thumbnail gallery, such as is done on google images. And even then it is to provide a link to content that appears elsewhere that is legal to use. Usage of this kind of content in a Wikipedia article just doesn't seem to fit the same sort of criteria, and requires multiple clicks to get to the "original" image and information about the actual copyright owner of the photo.
Reproducing artwork and other cultural artifacts for scholarly commentary is pretty well established, and is done literally thousands of times per year in academic journals. Heck, a recent journal article I read [http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/montfort] even reproduced the entire source code of the 1977 Atari game _Combat_ as part of its commentary. It's not as if this is some sort of amazing new use that we're the first to discover.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
To me, reproductions of 2D art, especially when it is the entire artwork that is reproduced even in reduced resolution, essentially reproduced the entire artwork. The only legitimate "fair-use" example I have seen for this that has been accepted in U.S. common law is for a thumbnail gallery, such as is done on google images. And even then it is to provide a link to content that appears elsewhere that is legal to use. Usage of this kind of content in a Wikipedia article just doesn't seem to fit the same sort of criteria, and requires multiple clicks to get to the "original" image and information about the actual copyright owner of the photo.
Reproducing artwork and other cultural artifacts for scholarly commentary is pretty well established, and is done literally thousands of times per year in academic journals. Heck, a recent journal article I read [http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/montfort] even reproduced the entire source code of the 1977 Atari game _Combat_ as part of its commentary. It's not as if this is some sort of amazing new use that we're the first to discover.
-Mark
I've asked before, but are there any publications of the scale of Wikipedia that acutally use fair-use artwork? In nearly every instance I find licensed images instead, including several that have been offered today on the various talk pages of Wikipedia that were referencing Encyclopedia Britannica. I don't see fair use being used to this extent at all in major publications, even textbooks about artwork.
On 2/9/07, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
I've asked before, but are there any publications of the scale of Wikipedia that acutally use fair-use artwork?
Google. Yahoo.
After that there are not very many publications on the scale of wikipedia.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Reproducing artwork and other cultural artifacts for scholarly commentary is pretty well established, and is done literally thousands of times per year in academic journals. Heck, a recent journal article I read [http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/montfort] even reproduced the entire source code of the 1977 Atari game _Combat_ as part of its commentary. It's not as if this is some sort of amazing new use that we're the first to discover.
I've asked before, but are there any publications of the scale of Wikipedia that acutally use fair-use artwork? In nearly every instance I find licensed images instead, including several that have been offered today on the various talk pages of Wikipedia that were referencing Encyclopedia Britannica. I don't see fair use being used to this extent at all in major publications, even textbooks about artwork.
Well, I just linked you to a journal article freely published online; one among many. Do you want a hit counter on it or something to satisfy your "scale" requirement? I don't see what that would have to do with it anyway---How is fair use in a journal any different than fair use in an encyclopedia, legally speaking?
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
I've asked before, but are there any publications of the scale of Wikipedia that acutally use fair-use artwork? In nearly every instance I find licensed images instead, including several that have been offered today on the various talk pages of Wikipedia that were referencing Encyclopedia Britannica. I don't see fair use being used to this extent at all in major publications, even textbooks about artwork.
Well, I just linked you to a journal article freely published online; one among many. Do you want a hit counter on it or something to satisfy your "scale" requirement? I don't see what that would have to do with it anyway---How is fair use in a journal any different than fair use in an encyclopedia, legally speaking?
-Mark
The main point I was trying to offer here is that if you are concerned about copyright and being in a very public place like Wikipedia is where people would stand up and pay attention if you violate copyrights in an obvious fashion (by the owners of that copyrighted material).
I'm actually very surprised about this source code being here, to be honest. Atari (or whoever currently owns the Atari brand and the existing software from that company) still asserts copyright on this content, and has even licensed it relatively recently to a couple of toy manufacturers who have made "retro" games based on the old Atari 2600 cartrige systems. For this to be a complete dump of the content is IMHO the software equivalent to quoting verbatium an entire poem without permission and claiming fair use. I'm not sure this one would hold up if challenged, even though all that is shown is the object code.
It does, however, fit the definition of "one good example" that I've been seeking, even though it isn't really traditional art work. Computer software, particularly something written nearly 30 years ago, has certainly depreciated in value to the point that you could legitimately argue that its publication in this manner does not adversely affect its marketability.
Traditional art works, however, tends to appreciate in value over time, particularly when it is art work from popular artists and even more once that artist has died. This may be part of why the Louvre is trying to assert copyrights over some of the paintings in its galleries. In cases where the art is still clearly under copyright, I can imagine a much tougher time to consider the images of that art to be properly considered fair use and not infringing on the artist's copyright.
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