[Foundation-l] Board meeting in Rotterdam later this week

[David Strauss]

Perhaps we should require fair use justification for non-commercial
media. Of course, this would be a per-Wikipedia issue, not a Foundation one.

Requiring fair-use justification for non-commercial images forces one of
two outcomes:
1) The non-commercial image is revealed to be non-essential or
replaceable with a free image. The non-commercial image is replaced with
something free.
2) The non-commercial image is justified as essential, and people can
redistribute the Wikipedia article (and its media) under fair use,
non-commercial use, or both.

David Strauss wrote:
> It doesn't matter what you consider a "trick." Fair use and licenses are
> both legal concepts with equal importance.
> 
> A country banning fair use is tantamount to censorship because it bans
> essential forms of parody, criticism, and discussion. Those are
> essential freedoms -- historically and philosophically. In the same way
> that Wikipedia doesn't censor itself for China, it shouldn't stop
> exercising fair use just because some countries don't allow it.
> 
> As for non-commercial images, show me *one* you can't replace with a
> free alternative. Non-commercial images are generally a convenience.
> 
> And if you find an image that is non-commercial and has no alternative
> for discussing a topic in an article, you now have the possibility of
> fair use, anyway.
> 
> rfrangi at libero.it wrote:
>>> So, I'm against using non-commercial images unless we're using them
>>> under fair use because we don't have a substitute.
>>>
>>> If we use a fair-use image, a commercial organization can at least take
>>> whole Wikipedia pages and re-use them. On the contrary, non-commercial
>>> images must be removed if they don't meet fair-use criteria.
>> Fair use images have to be removed as well if you reuse the contents in places where the concept of fair use does not exist.
>>
>>> The key here is that we're producing a free-content *encyclopedia* on
>>> Wikipedia, not a free library of the media used to create the content.
>>> (Wikimedia Commons *is* a project creating a free library of media.)
>>> This means the final goal is free-content articles. Non-commercial
>>> images undermine that goal.
>> Fair use undermine that goal as well. Fair use is not a license, is "an excuse to use copyrighted material". As such,  it does not protect you from a legal action and in the end a judge will decide if an image is used "fairly" or not.
>>
>> Beside that, please understand that you can't force a community to abandon NC's, when they consider fair use as being worse than NC. No way. As long as fair use will be allowed on en.wiki, NC's will be allowed on it.wiki. I wish both will not be accepted, but NC is a licence, fair use is a trick, so for what concerns me, if the latter stays, the former will stay as well. 
>>
>> Roberto (Snowdog)
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------
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>>
>>
>>
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