[WikiEN-l] Image statistics -- 374 000+ "fair use" images

[Fastfission]

On 7/13/06, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>   User:Kotepho queried the en: database as of July 4, 2006 to get numbers on
> media we are hosting.  The results are at [[User:Kotepho/reports/Images by
> copyright status statistics]].
>
>   In short, we had the following:
>
>   853 215 tagged as having a free license
>   374 304 tagged with a variant of "fair use"
>
>   As a point of comparison, Commons has
>
>   677 813 media files as of this email's timestamp
>
>   Roughly half of our "fair use" images are tagged with the template for
> "magazine cover" or "promophoto".

"Promophoto" is a very ambiguous and often incorrectly applied
template. I have never been happy with it -- most people seem to think
that any image which appears unattributed multiple places on the
internet counts as promotional photograph.

"Magazine cover" and other media covers on the other hand are pretty
straightforward, and are probably legally pretty safe as well (they
are transformative, they do not infringe directly upon the market of
the image creator, their source is obvious).

So in the case of "promophoto", I'd say having so many of them is
probably a bad sign. With "magazine cover", it's not so bad, from a
"safe legal Wikipedia" standpoint. (The "we'd like to have more free
content" standpoint is another question alltogether.)

FF