--- "Alex T." <alex756(a)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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