[Foundation-l] precisions about the recent WMF "fair use" decision - Wikimedia-l

8 Feb 2007

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"?