Hi.
There's another argument I've forgotten to mention:
It may well be that "fair use" is protected in the USA, but that doesn't mean that some big nasty company can't sue the project. Many companies in the USA use the legal system as a blunt weapon, without caring much whether they'll eventually win or lose any given fight.
They'll have more money than we'll do, and they could take it as far as they wanted.
Of course, in most cases like this we could simply remove the relevant images. But that could be more of a problem for projects (educational, in the US) who have printed or made CD copies of Wikipedia.
Also, we could be exposed to companies with an agenda, such as puppets for encyclopedia publishers. Who knows, maybe the pure audacity of Wikipedia as a source of Free information will piss of some of the bigger media conglomerates.
I say this counts in favour of staying away from non-free material, free use or not.
-- Daniel
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Hi,
Le Thursday 19 February 2004 19:55, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen a écrit :
There's another argument I've forgotten to mention:
It may well be that "fair use" is protected in the USA, but that doesn't mean that some big nasty company can't sue the project. Many companies in the USA use the legal system as a blunt weapon, without caring much whether they'll eventually win or lose any given fight.
They do not need fair use for that. They can use many other arguments. So this is a poor argument against fair use.
Yann
- -- http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclopédie libre http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Yann Forget wrote:
Le Thursday 19 February 2004 19:55, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen a écrit :
It may well be that "fair use" is protected in the USA, but that doesn't mean that some big nasty company can't sue the project. Many companies in the USA use the legal system as a blunt weapon, without caring much whether they'll eventually win or lose any given fight.
They do not need fair use for that. They can use many other arguments. So this is a poor argument against fair use.
I agree this argument is weaker than the others in favour of avoiding fair use images.
Nevertheless: Using images that typically belong to just the kind of people we're going to be pissing of the most sets us up particularly well for attacks from them.
For most other arguments (say libel), we could deny that that was the case.
Here, we won't be able to deny that we used somebody else's copyrighted work - just that our interpretation of the law makes it ok to do so.
To put it in words that are usually unfamiliar to me: We don't want to be dogmatists. We don't want to fight for the right to use these images. We want to be pragmatists, which means to focus on creating the encyclopedia.
-- Daniel
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Le Thursday 19 February 2004 20:34, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen a écrit :
To put it in words that are usually unfamiliar to me: We don't want to be dogmatists. We don't want to fight for the right to use these images. We want to be pragmatists, which means to focus on creating the encyclopedia.
-- Daniel
But that's exactly what I say! Don't be dogmatist. Accept fair use when we can use it and we can't get a free image.
Actually, this whole discussion is quite rhetoric, as most of the images in Wikipedia (at least en:, but also fr:, for what I know) are not properly labelled. I think many of them are probably public domain or free but we can't say because of missing information. So first, we should properly label the images, and then come back to this discussion with the list of images under fair use. That's would be pragmatist!
Yann
- -- http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclopédie libre http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
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