On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 18:10:08 +0100, Philip Welch wikipedia@philwelch.net wrote:
So if someone download the article dump and the image dump with plans of publishing it in the US (outside they would have to delete all the faur use images anyway, or obtain permission for each individual image) then your humorous fair use image from your userpage become a copyright violation for that reuser because without your userpage he has no fair use defence for it. This means that re-users would have to spend time and effort to purge these humor, parody and other orphanded userpage stuff from the dump, and while it's not rocket sience to automate such a purge it's still an extra burden on re-users that is completely unnessesary.
Wouldn't they purge the entire User: namespace anyway? We're not so interesting as for our user pages be republished in an actual encyclopedia.
Yeah, but the images are not stored in the User: namespace. Currently there is no way to selectively download images that are just used in articles (unless you use a spider to grab content instead of the database dumps, wich realy is not a good idea as it kills our servers).
Now granted our image dump already contains a *lot* of copyright problems (like our 30.000+ untagged images), so orphanded fair use parody images from userpages might not be the biggest problem for re-users at the moment, but at least we are working toward the goal of cleaning up that mess. However if we allowed fair use on user pages those would never be cleaned up on our end (unless a better image dump system gets developed), meaning we would basicaly force reusers to download a bunch of files they can't use and have to delete just because some Wikipedia users wanted to have something funny on theyr userpage. Personaly I don't think can rely be justified.
