[WikiEN-l] Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project boring to death

[Anthony]

On 7/27/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's
> > fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that
> > we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the
> > copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for
> > christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that
> > important.
>
> Fair use is an extremely important exemption to copyright law. There
> are good reasons to prohibit it e.g. in the User: space, and to
> require users to upload their own works as free content. But there is
> no single good reason why a photo that is important to Wikipedia's
> history, and that cannot easily be obtained as free content, wouldn't
> qualify as fair use in the Wikipedia: namespace.
>
You make these comments as though they are obvious, but I for one
don't understand what you're referring to.

What are the good reasons to "prohibit fair use" in the User namespace
that don't apply to the Wikipedia namespace?  If the photo of Bernard
was on my User namespace, would that be inappropriate?

Personally I don't see the problem with allowing ND licenses
throughout the user namespace and the Wikipedia namespace, and even in
the article namespace in situations where a more free license is not
available.  Anything under an ND license is pretty much automatically
fair use.

Anthony