[WikiEN-l] Questionable fair use claims: a case study

[Matt Brown]

On 10/20/05, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>
> Fewer people seem to have cameras than I would have imagined. It took
> me all of two minutes to roll my [[lawn mower]] out and make original
> images for the article, but we still have all these people uploading
> the first poor thumbnail of a commonplace object that Google finds
> for them.
>

The problem is worst on such generic articles, as you say. If one's writing
a specific article on a specific lawnmower, say the [[GrassMaster Lawn
Master 2000]], then one needs a specific picture of that specific model. It
might have been out of production for 20 years and examples are hard to
find. In that case, I believe it's quite acceptable to go to the GrassMaster
corporate website to see if they have a picture we could use under fair use,
or scan an image out of a period GrassMaster catalog. We're using a
company's own promotional image to illustrate (and thus, in a sense,
promote) their own product - a fairly slam-dunk fair use case, and likely
counting as use with permission as well (so zero chance we'll get sued). Of
course, should some fellow Wikipedian be a lawnmower collector who has one,
it's preferable if we get their free-licensed photos to replace it.

Using such a photo on a more generic page, such as [[lawn mower]], is not a
good fair use. Such is a large proportion of the bogus fair use claims we
get.

The other category is people who, wanting to illustrate the [[GrassMaster
Lawn Master 2000]] article, will rummage through their well-thumbed stack of
"Lawnmower Monthly" until they find one on the cover, scan that cover, and
use the magazine cover to illustrate the article. After all, "aren't
magazine covers always fair use"?

-Matt