[WikiEN-l] Re: New fair use tag proposal

[Andrew Gray]

On 11/07/05, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
:
> 
> [[Image:Carrie_Buck.jpg]] is used in two articles: [[Carrie Buck]] and
> [[Buck v. Bell]]. I think it is fair use in both contexts, though they
> have separate purpose (in one it illustrates the main subject of a
> biographical article, in another it is illustrating a plaintiff in a
> court case. Such dual-fair use should be made explicit; it would not
> be necessarily fair use on any other page. Under my proposal, it would
> contain two separate fair use notices, one for each page it was used
> on.

Here's another I've just run across.
[[Image:Teutonic_order_charge.jpg]] is a (cropped, I believe) version
of the front of a box of miniatures. It's been tagged {{Gamecover}},
which is a bit flaky but I can live with.

But it's got a fair-use claim on it now - "it's fair use since it came
from a game box" - and so has been used in two different articles,
[[Teutonic Knights]] and [[Battle of Grunwald]]. Some poking around
finds that the artist himself is still selling prints of the image.

I'm fairly sure this claim wouldn't hold up - we're not using the
image to illustrate anything about the material it was used with,
there's no critical reason to use this not another image, &c &c.

Yet {{gamecover}} (and {{bookcover}}) are pretty much poster-boy
examples of fair use claims. How many images do we have filed away
that are like this, *sections* of a book cover, used irrelevantly to
the book, but tagged fair use?

It's a good exception, and I'm pleased we're making use of it for all
the many images we'd otherwise have to neglect, but it hides a
multitude of reasonable-sounding but logically problematic usages.
Perhaps the use of "this image is fair use due to being of type X"
templates is a possible problem here? It's safe to say that using a
book cover when discussing the book is fair use; it's certainly not
safe to say that an image on a book cover is thereby inherently fair
use.

Your proposal to start auditing through them has a lot of merit, I
think. We have maybe 200-250ish {{book cover}}s, and pushing a
thousand {{gamecover}}; a lot of work, there.

Any more thoughts since you last posted on it?

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk