On 9/14/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
Do we have an official policy on images on user pages? Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the use of copyrighted materials there in a way which did not qualify as "fair use" simply be copyright infringement, in the same way it would in the article namespace? Does the law make the namespace distinction? (That sounds like a silly question in a way, but I suppose I'm referencing "safe harbor" laws.)
In the end, I think this comes down to "should we allow copyright violations on user pages?" which sounds to me like the answer would be "of course not".
Copyright violations are one thing and should be removed. Far more sticky are other types of images that would not be copyright violations per se but are still against our general policies on image use. A great example are images under a non-commercial or used with permission license. The reason why we don't allow such images in articles is to keep the encyclopedia as free as possible. But user pages are *not* part of the encyclopedia, thus having those type of images there does not really hamper third party use of our content.
So, IMO, we should be far more lax on what we allow on user pages. Mid to long term, what we *really* need is to offer downloads of content that strip out all pages in the Wikipedia and user namespace (sic: everything that is Wikipedia-specific). This would require more extensive use of the help namespace for things like the multimedia help page and spoiler warning though.
Didn't we already discuss this when Pioneer-12 wanted to retain copyright to his user and talk page postings? Didn't we already decide that anything more restrictive than GFDL on Wikipedia would be license hell and not worth the trouble to administer? Didn't we already decide that the submit button was equivalent to a digital signature agreeing to the terms and conditions of submission?
I thought we already did. I hold the view that the allowable licenses should be consistent across the entire Wikipedia site, and that people should know and follow the rules in all Wikipedia locations. This includes user pages, and certainly includes images submitted as well.