[WikiEN-l] Fair use issues; we need serious help

[Charlotte Webb]

On 7/12/07, WikipediaEditor Durin <wikidurin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bottom line here; the Foundation has mandated that we come into
> compliance by Spring of '08. I'm telling you this is flat our impossible
> under the current situation where little in the way of clear demarcation
> has been given.

The obvious strategy would be to start with the most obvious
violations. But even for those, our only means (as non-admins) of
dealing with such images, even the ones whose "fair use" wouldn't be
defensible in a million years (after which copyright will have
hopefully expired, mind you) -- even for a copyrighted picture of a
common household object -- is to put the little red and white dated
tags on there and hope it actually stays there for seven consecutive
days (or whatever the common-law requirement is, which has no basis in
policy).

It could be argued that we need a swifter formal deletion process, one
that isn't functionally identical to WP:PROD, or it could be argued
that people who actually have a working knowledge of image use policy
should be both technically able and morally empowered to delete
obvious violations on sight.

—C.W.