Sam Korn wrote:
On 1/12/06, Chris Jenkinson chris@starglade.org wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm just curious whether we have a policy on the use of fair use images on user pages, rather than a guideline, and if so, what our procedure is for enforcement of that policy if it says no such images permitted. Obviously discussion is the first stepping stone, but if the user in question refuses to remove it, what actions should admins take in order to do so? I'm thinking of page protection and blocking here. I know someone has been indefinitely blocked in the past because he did not license his user page under the GFDL.
It's quite simple really. Wikipedia's biggest reason for qualifying for fair use is that it is a free educational resource. Userpages are just not educational. User pages would, if I read the situation right, be very little different from a GeoCities website or the equivilent. Image use would not qualify as fair use there; why should it here?
Seeing as how 99% of personal websites out there have images infringing on somebody's copyright, most users have the impression that nobody cares about the issue.
Perhaps it would be more effective to point out that WP is now a high-visibility site, and that all the other sites at WP's level (that are not personal page hosts) are pretty careful about copyright and attribution. You could even ask the user to try to find even one "fair use" picture on news.yahoo.com or some such, should drive the point home.
Stan