[WikiEN-l] Deleting orphaned unfree images

[Stan Shebs]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> I was thinking your motivation was to reduce some real-world harm. E.g.,
>> images sitting for a week causes difficulty X to person Y. I gather
>> you're saying it's a more abstract thing, an aesthetic preference?
>>     
>
> The real world harm is that of copyright violations. IANAL, so I don't
> know if it is actually illegal for us to have unfree images on the
> site for a week without them being fair use, but it has to be quite
> close to that fine line.
"According to Wikipedia", the copyright holder does have to make a claim 
of infringement before the legal system will even take an interest in 
the matter. I don't really see how any copyright holder is going to make 
much of a case for the revenue they're losing because a copy of an image 
is flagged as being a probable copyvio for a few days, and is deleted 
even faster if they complain about it. Intent is all-important, and it 
will be pretty clear to everybody that we police ourselves rather 
severely, in fact several fair-use advocates who work in the publishing 
business grumble that we're being way pickier about copyright than is 
normal for the industry.

To tie back into admins, it would be amusing if a court ordered us to 
create more admins so that copyvio backlogs could be cleared quicker. 
:-) Then people voting against RfAs could be jailed for being in 
contempt of court... :-)

Stan