[WikiEN-l] Non-free images, there has to be a better way

[Fastfission]

I'm coming into this a bit late, but the silliest thing about this
policy is that the two types images currently allowed under Wikipedia
policy are one with a free license, and ones without any free license
at all except our somewhat dubious pro-active claim of fair use (fair
use in the U.S. can only be used in defense, it cannot be used
offensively).

Now I understand the importance of having free licenses, but I think
it is very silly that images licensed for non-commercial use are
singled out as "non-free" while slapping "fair use" on anything seems
to get by without so much as the raising of an eyebrow most of the
time.

Let us say this is about content providing -- i.e., we don't provide
things that others can't use. I don't see why "fair use" images would
be any different in this respect -- the individual user is going to
have to evaluate whether their particular use of the image is still
covered by fair use, whether they want to take that gamble, etc. If
non-profit Wikipedia feels comfortable using copyrighted images of
Mickey Mouse and claiming fair use, great, but any future for-profit
encyclopedia is going to have to answer for themselves. "Fair use" is
just as conditional on context and use as any "permission for anything
non-commercial" -- perhaps even worse, since pre-emptively claiming
fair use is playing with legal fire as it is.

If we are only going to provide "totally free" content, we should
eliminate all fair use images as well. If we are not going to do that,
we should not worry so much about images which are licensed under
relatively free licenses -- i.e., free for use with acknowledgement,
free for use in non-commercial settings, free for use just on
Wikipedia, etc.

Claiming "fair use" in general seems legally problematic to me in
general but I'm not a lawyer. I could imagine a very clever Disney
lawyer saying, "Well, Wikipedia gives the impression that its content
is 'free', and puts our images right next to the rest of their 'free'
content. If Wikipedia was just trying to make their own non-profit
encyclopedia, that would be one thing, but since they are also trying
to provide an open-source, re-distributable content, they are actually
in the business of telling people our copyrighted work is of
questionable legal status, which we must affirm to the contrary."
Whether such an argument would hold or not is not something I know,
but it would be a messy thing nonetheless. And rest assured Disney
Corp. would be no more worried about the "legions" of nasty e-mails
they might get from Wikipedians than Microsoft Corp. does from the
Open-Source movement members.

FF

On 7/4/05, Maury Markowitz <maury at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> During May I wrote an article on the IBM 1360. This machine is
> historically important, it was the first (commercial) terabit store.
> None of them exist any more, they were all decommissioned in the 1980s
> and scrapped. I spent a week getting permission from the UCal to use
> some of their images, images that really helped make the article, and
> added these on June 2nd.
> 
> AFTER posting the images I went back to change the image info on one of
> them. I was shocked to see a notice saying they would be deleted,
> although there was no date given. Needless to say I was more than a
> little pissed off that I was only told about this AFTER going through
> the effort. There was no notice of this, at least at the time, on either
> the main page or the upload page. I wrote about this in the image
> discussion page.
> 
> More recently I went back to the article and found all the images
> deleted. The deleter added a note, but as far as I can tell did so AFTER
> deleting them ( I can't get history on the image itself, of course).. He
> stated I should have tagged them differently. Yes, well, thanks for
> that,  maybe someone should have told me that in the month between me
> uploading them and them being deleted so I could have actually DONE that.
> 
> My complaint here is the completely arbitrary and largely invisible
> nature of this decision and its ramifications. The entire dicussion
> appears to have take place offline. If there was a public online
> dicussion, it was rather well hidden. I certainly was not privvy to it
> until AFTER the decision was made. Further, reading over the discussion
> here, it seems no dissenting views were considered. Nor is there any
> real reason given, other than "we don't like them". I asked for someone
> to explain it to me, but no one did, and they were simply deleted.
> 
> What's particularily baffling is that the deleter suggested I simply
> re-tag them to PermissionAndFairUse. This strikes me as absolutely
> rediculous. First of all, why are these OK and not ones used with
> permission? And if these are OK, why didn't it say so in the warning on
> the Permission tag? And finally why didn't anyone bother to tell anyone
> the answers to these, and all the other questions?
> 
> Maury
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>