[WikiEN-l] J-Pop and the art of fair use abuse

[Charlotte Webb]

I'm completely stunned by this thread:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=124583952#84.211.71.5

Looking at the whole situation I'm not too concerned about Martinp23's
block, which would have been reasonable if the information leading to it had
been true (but it wasn't). The anonymous User:84.211.71.5 was not running a
bot and was not removing legitimately "fair use" images either. The images
he was removing failed the first fair use criterion "no free image could
serve the same purpose" and thus were copyvios, mostly pictures of Japanese
pop musicians.

I logged onto freenode and spoke to some administrators about this, but
nobody really seemed to care. One of them said I should take it to the
mailing list, so here I am.

That we have users who are clueless or apathetic about copyright is not a
nothing new, I realize, but it concerns me how many of them are
administrators.

> (ec) Should we rollback their changes? Looks like (almost) all those Fair
> Use images are legit right now - Alison☺ 23:29, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

They are? All these people are alive and still performing. The only ones I
didn't tag for deletion (out of roughly 75 images removed by 84.211.71.5)
were one or two photos of bands which have broken up, as the certainty that
they can be replaced is less absolute.

> Yeah, I'm going to roll them back. Veinor (talk to me) 23:31, 20 April
> 2007 (UTC)

"Oh noes, vandalbot that is removing all our pretty pictures"

> Looking through the edits, it seems that he was iterating through various
> categories (or some other system) of Japanese musicians and bands, filling
> in the infobox with the "no image" placeholder (see [1]), seemingly
> regardless of whether something was there already or not. Mass rollback is
> probably appropriate here, as long as the images are checked after
> restoration (those that I've looked at seem to be valid uses). Thanks,
> Martinp23 23:34, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

But if you'd checked any ten of them, you would have found at least eight
copyvios.

I've been advised to stop commenting at WP:AN/I lest I be labeled a troll,
but I would like some idea of how to address a community that handles image
policy issues like this so poorly.

And what can be done about this fork of Template:Promophoto?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:HelloProject-Photo
If you read the fine print you'll see it implies that WP:NFCC#1 is being
waived for J-Pop, which can't possibly be true... I think.

Charlotte
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