Amen. This is the goal of Wikipedia's fair use policy -- proper fair use when necessary, well thought out, with the issues at stake well understood.
A number of people have occasionally taken calls for a restricted fair use policy to imply copyright paranoia or some sort of feebleness in standing up for fair use rights. This is of course not anyone's goal. In my mind, the more careful, deliberate, and (hopefully) informed we are in the implementation of fair use policies, the more confidence we can have in our use of fair use images, and the more empowered we actually are in the end. Poor or pointless invocations of fair use strengthen nothing but the arguments and hysterical claims of those many parties out there whose goals are to make copyright law as binding and restrictive as possible.
FF
On 1/20/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:
Wikipedia should rely upon the contributions of its editors, not on material others have created, if possible. Of course it's impossible to get a new photo of a historical event, taken by a Wikipedian, but we should make sure that all fair use images which aren't of past events should be replaced with new images which Wikipedians have contributed. That's what Wikipedia is about to me.
I concur.
I definitely don't want fair use images to go from en: completely. My favourite article with heavy use of fair use images is [[Xenu]]. One is the cover of "Dianetics", illustrating a point in the article about Scientology book covers after the Xenu story was put into Scientology; one is the [[Sea Org]] logo, which also comes from the Xenu story; and one is a sample of L. Ron Hubbard's handwriting, showing the only known example of the word "Xenu" in his own handwriting. None of those three are particularly replaceable. But their use in that article is pretty clearly academic fair use, and I did run them past Jimbo before it was made a front page feature, given Scientology's famously strong legal defence of anything it sees as a copyright or trademark violation. So far we haven't heard a peep out of Scientology on the matter, and they're well aware of the article (and at least one staff member has edited it), so I would presume they accept legal action on the matter would be a losing proposition (though I believe they have a few years before we can be sure laches has kicked in).
- d.
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