--- "Alex T." alex756@nyc.rr.com wrote:
There may be the _rare_ occasion when an image is so publically well known (i.e. a famous photo of something that is very _news_ worthy) that practically any informational use may be covered by fair use, but that will be _very rare_. Most fair uses will not be 100% compatible with the GNU FDL.
IOW: The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe (not Legalese)...Fair use is a ubiquitous legal plugin that tries to keep molehill issues from become mountains of suits over nonsense.
Im not sure what Brion was saying about resolution--IF you understand how printing works, you know that you generally need twice the dpi for a screen print-- (printing is dots of color right--used to be done with "dot screens", now done on 'puters). So to properly render a magazine photo of a Kalvin Klein ad--mimicking the quality of the original photo (which is impossible -- a cameras ultimate resolution is way higher than print, which is way higher than web.) youd basically need to copy the thing purty durn well. (Also not legalese)
Consider an album cover -- the value of which is in part based on its quality of rendering -- aethethic qualities that cannot be reproduced from a tiny little web picture --even a "large" pic at only at 72dpi (ie. standard)-- roughly a quarter of that necessary to properly render it as a print, and this doesnt come close to having something that someone can make a poster out of and sell.
So, it seems that the image use policy is generally made null by the mere fact that these images are web-based, and therefore low resolution. Granted the web is well-used, and print reproduceability is no longer a standard (was it ever?) but where uniqueness of images is protected, it seems that its impossible to sincerely fault a diminished-quality rendering for the crime of imposing itself as a substitute for the original.
This is a good point. Even if you don't keep a copy, it is still being copied automatically when it is being displayed on the Wikipedia page. Someone does not have to click on it to go to another web page. Therefore some jury or judge can easily make a legal finding that the deep link is a copy on Wikipedia (never know what judges or juries will do until the law becomes well settled).
But its reasonable that display issues may simply break down as "fair use" standards do-- a case-by-case look at the pertinent factors -whats it for? was there credit to the source? is it high-quality? was it used in print? profit? etc...
What is clear in all of this is that there needs to be a better, more centralized cross-languages way of handling images, perhaps an images domain -- so that highband users can attempt to manage these better--copyright issues can be dealt with more swiftly and therefore the intelligencia doesnt have to trip too much about the potential possibility of things they only suspect. Having separate imagelists for each seem silly.
~S~ IANAL, but not a very good one.
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