[WikiEN-l] Fair use in the UK

[Caroline Ford]

Nathan Russell wrote:

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> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> | It has been called to my attention that the concept of "fair use" may
> | be significantly more restricted in the UK than in the US, to the
> | point that most of what is fair use in the US may not be in the UK.
> |
> | If that's true, then we need to radically reassess our policy on fair
> | use images, likely restricting or even eliminating them entirely, even
> | though everything we're doing on our site is totally valid for us, we
> | need to be extremely sensitive to the needs of people who might seek
> | to reuse our content.
> |
> | --Jimbo
>
> Jimbo, to what extent do we need to respect the policies of other
> nations, and which other nations?  No offense is meant to the many UK
> folks on this list, but I would not want wikipedia to have to remove all
> content that the Chinese or Saudi government objected to.
>
> Nathan
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Fair use is only US. Britain is hardly Saudi Arabia or Noth Korea.

Fair dealing is very different.

I think tagging images with precise details of usage is the way forward. 
One problem with only allowing public domain images is that only the US 
government puts its images in the public domain. So only US articles 
will be properly illustrated.

To be honest, I'd rather people were concentrating on unlabelled images. 
We can then decide whether we want to delete all the non-US images that 
are used with permission as that is the only way to use them. From this 
side of the Atlantic US fair use images are worse than ones we are 
legally allowed to use.

We need to go on an image tagging drive. And then have the discussion ON 
THE WIKI so that the other 99% of users and contributors are aware of 
the debate. Even most adminsitrators don't contribute to the mailing lists.