On 5/30/2011 2:32 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
Hello,
There's a bit of discussion about deleting old versions of fair-use
files in the Hebrew Wikipedia and it may be interesting to other
projects as well.
The main questions is: Should old versions of fair-use files be
deleted? The two main points that support the deletion are that it
saves space on the server and that keeping a version of a non-free
file violates the fair use policy, because the old version of the
image can be viewed, but is not actually used in any relevant article.
I just want
to see if I understand this correctly. Is this a reference
to files where the current revision is included in some article based on
a fair use rationale, but the file also has earlier versions that are
not so used? As opposed to a file that was previously used in an
article, but is no longer used at all. In the latter situation, it's
hard to make a fair use argument because there is no actual use case to
point to, and I think the consensus has been that those files should be
deleted, consistent with our policies limiting the exemptions for
non-free content.
For the first case, there's at least a plausible rationale that
consistent with how MediaWiki operates, its public record of how the
file was derived could be acceptable, including modifications that may
be indicated by the file history. It might, for example, indicate how
the current revision is a sufficiently "transformative" use to qualify
as fair use, enough to justify the limited "use" of the otherwise unused
old revision. Of course, if you start an analysis based on revision
histories like that, you might also conclude that "unused" fair use
files can be kept because they were used in previous revisions of articles.
That's primarily an abstract theoretical response, and without some
concrete examples to look at I don't really have much of an opinion on
which direction we should resolve the question. Nor have I tried to
consider how persuasive a court would find potential arguments on either
side.
--Michael Snow