On 12/5/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
I've been assuming that the policy about not applying "fair use" for these photographs was entirely of Wikipedia's design, and is not really related to copyright law. You're suggesting that we're actually breaking copyright law if we do use "fair use" for promotional photographs instead of going out and taking a new photo. Does anyone know either way?
It depends.
Questions of what the law says can only really be answered on a case by case basis and generealy need to be quite carefuly defined (for example a trivial answer to you question is that it would be illegal but that is because you failed to specify the legal system you were tlaking about).
Can you steal a promotional image which some B grade hollywood star desperately wants everyone to use at any opportunity?
Certainly the most obvious case would be one in which the hollywood star did not own the copyright to the photo.
I certainly agree with you about people filling gaps - I've taken quite a few "gap-filler" photos myself - but taking good photos of celebrities is pretty hard. Here's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jerry_Seinfeld_%281997%29.jpg
We're not even sure that this *is* a free image, and this is at the better end of the scale of the free celebrity photos we have. And do you think Seinfeld, his publicist, us, or anyone is really happy that we have a crappy photo of him rather than a professionally executed publicity shot?
The publicist is free to release a photo under a lisence we can use.