Firstly, I am aware of that. However the user in question never bothered to inform people, causing a lot of anger. Secondly, legal advice I have says that it wrong. A template image unrelated to an article is definitely illegal. However a template in effect bridging articles operates under a different legal framework and a relevant image in a template in an article space, where it does nothing more than visually facilitate a link and carries no claim of ownership or implicit meaning other than that facilitatory link, is covered by fair use according to a senior lawyer I know.
The relevant note on fair use on Wikipedia fails to distinguish between relevant visual usage and presumptuous ownership. The former is why fairuse is OK in articles. In a visually based links-run encyclopædia, templates follow the same role as links in articles and the use of graphics and image to enable that link is not as suggested in the quote below. --- Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/10/05, Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
- If you look at his "contributions" you'll see
he's
been doing this to a lot of templates lately where it's quite clear (IMO) fair-use allows the images
to
be used.
For what it's worth:
"[Fair use] material should *only* be used in the article namespace. They should *never* be used on templates (including stub templates and navigation boxes) or on user pages."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fair_use#Policy
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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