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

[John Vandenberg]

On 7/14/07, WikipediaEditor Durin <wikidurin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/12/07, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If all logo rationales are alike, why is {{Non-free logo}}
> > insufficient?  What else is needed?  The reason I ask is that perhaps
> > a few params can be added to {{Non-free logo}} to cater to the
> > additional licencing issues.
>
> And here's another portion of the argument; can fair use rationales
> be boiler plated? Some say no, some say yes. We argue endlessly
> about this.

Hi Durin,

I have separately arrived at the conclusion that there must be some
non-free images that can be "boiler plated", but I am keen to read up
if you could you direct me to some argument against this, or outline
the salient points here.

I am honestly trying to get my head around how we divide the problem
into a few classes of images that can be dealt with in different ways,
such as:

1. images without any or incorrect copyright indicators,

  cohesion has pointed out that we have a few categories for this.

2. non-free images that can be readily covered by fair use, and

  It seems that each of the {{non-free...}} templates provided on the
upload form could fit into this group, but each type of image (logo,
album, etc) would have specifics that need to be addressed.

3. non-free images that are definitely not covered.

  Is there a list that describes what images are absolutely ruled out?
 I'm not sure such a list would be useful as it would be very long,
but a shorter list of a few commonly uploaded files that are
unacceptable could be useful to give to people first getting started
on image patrol.

If we can better define the most simple cases, the backlog can be
tackled by humans and bots in a semi-automated fashion.  That would
leave two messy groups to be attended to: non-free images that are
questionable under fair-use, and fair-use images that are used in a
way that doesnt appear to be fair use.  Those two both require skilled
negotiators to deal with appropriately.

Looking at logos specifically again, 99% of logos that are used on
only one article are probably the logo for that topic, and a human
could quickly go though and verify them all and tag them with
{{logo|<existing logo cat param>|fairuseon=blah}} to indicate that the
image is only fair use on that article.  Does resolution even come
into play with logos?  if we only use the thumbnail on the article, is
it acceptable for the actual image to be hi res?

Also, is "Images for deletion" working well?  Could fair-use disputes
(by bots) be taken to Ifd?  I think it would be helpful if fair-use
discussions were held in a centralised place per image, rather than on
some talk page as appears to be the case currently.

--
John