[Foundation-l] Banning Fair Use (was Re: Foundation Licensing Policy)

[Robert Horning]

Peter van Londen wrote:
> Hallo,
>
> There is one very simple argument, nobody likes to hear but it is valid:
>
> In principle all the content on whatever project must have the possibility
> to be reproduced, used (non-commercially but also commercially) and to be
> altered/changed. Free content licensed with GFDL or CC-BY-SA X.X do fit in
> this picture.
>
> The people reusing the content on wikimedia-site _can_ use Fair Use pictures
> under the same conditions as certain wikimedia-projects do, but they
> _cannot_ change the (copyrighted) fair-use pictures provided in the same
> document for example, as they could with all texts and with pictures with
> accepted licenses. (valid for countries which allow fair use)
>
> Therefore fair use pictures do not fully comply with the conditions under
> which the text is offered. It should be clear for the content-reusers that
> fair-use pictures have to be handled differently as the text. Fair Use
> pictures are not free content.
>
> Kind regards
> Londenp
>   
There are disclaimers on Wikibooks (and Wikipedia) that say just as 
much, that fair use content must be dealt with on a different basis.  
Although I would also have to add that you also have to treat images 
under other licenses like the Creative Commons licenses under separate 
terms than the main text of the article/book as well.  Fair use isn't 
unique here either for this sort of concern about different conditions 
for reuse.  And nobody is calling for an elimination of CC licenses on 
Commons either.  Or images released under the terms of the GPL.

A minor issue that does exist on Wikimedia projects is that the image 
license only appears if you click on the image itself and go the the 
"main" image page instead of seeing a reference to the content license 
inside of the article.  Perhaps it would be useful on the copyright 
pages that mention suggested steps to meet the legal requirements of the 
GFDL, that it would also be recommended that you review the copyright 
licenses of each image that you intend to redistribute, and that you 
maintain those same license terms for any of those images that you 
copy.  I'm fairly certainly that many of the Wikipedia mirrors don't 
take that extra step, but then again many mirrors don't include the 
images at all either.

I'm curious how the static Wikipedia on DVD does this in terms of noting 
the image copyright licenses.  Thinking aloud about how "printed" 
Wikibooks are also put together, I'm curious about what sort of 
bibliographic standard could be put together that would list the license 
credits of all images used in a book, and how to automatically generate 
that sort of appendix.  For now, I can only think of a manual method of 
generating a list of "credits" that would identify under what licenses 
each images has been used.  Of course "opaque" distributions of GFDL'd 
content require some sort of electronic access to the original source 
material, which in this case would be the URL to Wikibooks and you could 
obtain the licensing information in a round-about manner.  I don't think 
it is a legal requirement to disclose that multiple licenses have been 
used on image content, but it would represent scholarly honesty in doing so.

-- Robert Horning