--- Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu wrote:
Axel Boldt wrote in part:
How about if we give up our current distinction between images and text and require a single confirmation whenever people upload material to Wikipedia:
By uploading material to Wikipedia, you certify that either * the material is in the public domain, or * the copyright owner of the material releases it under GFDL,
or
* the material can be used under the [[fair use]] doctrine and such fair use will likely extend to all third party users of Wikipedia(maybe even with three checkboxes.)
You mean three radio buttons?
Yes.
But in the case of images (along the lines of album cover thumbnails), I don't think that we need to worry about future users of Wikipedia (much less try to guess who's /likely/ to be one of these and who isn't). This is because images can be easily removed by the future user.
Granted that it's easier to remove fair-use images than fair-use quotes, but even the former involves going through the articles that link to the removed images and removing the now-broken links. Not to mention the case-by-case decisions about which fair-use images to keep and which to remove. In effect, this necessary work prevents a quick-and-dirty third-party $10 Wikipedia CD from ever seeing the light of day. And there isn't much room: the Encyclopedia Britannica DVDROM sells for $50.
In the end, to get a cheap CD, we would probably have to produce a sanitized version of Wikipedia ourselves.
For quotations, we should be able to ensure that the quotation is fair use for /every/ potential user, so that would be all right.
Even for quotations you need the word "likely" somewhere: your quoting a line of Martin Luther King in an article about him is certainly fair use; my selling t-shirts with that quote on it is certainly not.
Thus, there is a practical difference between text and images.
True, but I'd like to maintain the spirit of GNU-free for the whole encyclopedia, not just for its text.
Axel
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