On 21 Oct 2005, at 12:24, Matt Brown wrote:
On 10/20/05, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
No, thats not reasonable. Just because you cant find a picture doesnt make it copyright free. Hardly anything has a justification that we cannot ever find a free one. I have recently been tagging all cars as fairusereplace as there are so few that there is no specimen surviving.
The legal doctrine of Fair Use does not require that we are unable to find a replacement under any circumstances. It is the general policy of Wikipedia - not the law - that we should attempt to replace Fair Use images with a wholly free one whenever we can, which I agree with.
The argument used is the converse - as we dont have a free picture we can tag anything fair use. Which is of course completely bogus.
I have found 2 pictures (in the wole of wikipedia) that I think are
fair use, there are easy replacements for everything else.
It sounds to me that you simply are working on a different definition of legal Fair Use than everyone else ...
I dont know. These are the ones I would pay a lawyer to defend. I wouldnt bother to defend it if Sony or Fox came and asked us to remove all their copyrighted images for example - would you? I dont think we have a watertight case. This is a somewhat different definition than some other people its true, but then some people arent that bothered about wikipedia being a free encyclopaedia apparently either.
The ones are those in [[Photo manipulation]] BTW.
Justinc