[WikiEN-l] Technical solution to bad fair use (was:Uploading images should be a privilige...)

[Stephen Bain]

On 8/1/06, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>
>   Another technical solution might be to impose terrible resolution on unfree
> images, which itself could be switched off (perhaps by bureaucrats) when there
> is a real need to (as, for instance, with the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad
> cartoons).  If the default was for unfree content to be less aesthetically
> appealing than freely-licensed content, we wouldn't have editors constantly
> replacing freely-licensed images with unfreely-licensed ones.

We can always resize fair use images to make them smaller. Most images
are displayed in articles as thmbnails no larger than 300px in width
(although images with landscape orientation are sometimes larger than
this), and I think that it would be reasonable to downsize most images
to this resolution or smaller.

Certainly anything which is in the same proportions as a standard
photo print or a computer display would not need to be any larger than
300px.

I doubt there would be any copyright implications with adjusting
images like this, if all we do is make them smaller - we're simply
using less of the copyrighted work. It would be as if we scanned or
copied the source at a lower resolution in the first place. Similarly
cropping images would be a modification with no copyright
implications. It would be important not to make any other
modifications though.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com