[Foundation-l] Re: Copyright complaints

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 2/13/06, sannse <sannse at tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
[snip]
> I guess you haven't seen the recent flaps and fracas over fair-use
> images on user pages.  Removing them is highly likely to cause an edit
> war, with a lot of people under the firm impression that "fair use"
> means "I can use it because it's pretty".
[snip]

What I've found to be more the case more often is that in *most* cases
the response from users is actually no too bad... just a little bit of
patience and explanation is required. However, the burden of
undertaking this process is great when you consider that there are
thousands of cases currently.

The bigger problem is that there is a small but non-trivial number of
users who will basically make your life a nightmare if you try... and
you never know who is going to snap at you... although there does
appear to be a relationship between that attitude and people who have
more userboxes than article edits as well as people with big notices
telling you that you must ask their permission before editing their
user page.  :)

When you combine these two you find that you have a large scale
problem, whos solution can not be effectively automated, which no user
in the right mind wishes to undertake.