On 0, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> scribbled:
On 7/12/07, Zoney <zoney.ie(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Of course, the simple option would simply be not
to use images on en
Wikipedia under a fair use rationale. That rationale (excusing the publisher
from copyright/licence violation) is not valid everywhere, nor are the
parameters the same.
If Wikipedia is supposed to be a free encyclopaedia, freely usable not just
in the USA and other places with similar fair use rationale, why complicate
matters with fair use images? Sure they can be stripped out prior to
publishing elsewhere in another medium, but the problem is that with fair
use images being allowed, plenty of article content will depend on such
images.
We have the dichotomy between the goal of building the best
encyclopedia possible, and building all-free content.
If these two goals did not collide, we would have no problem.
Unfortunately, they do, and in doing so cause untold misery.
Some things, such as album covers, screen caps for games, frames from
movies/anime... these have no possibility of replacable content. The
content we seek to illustrate is by nature copyrighted. Either we, as
a project, chose to do without such illustration, or we must accept
some copyrighted content under fair use justifications.
So far, policy is that we do so minimally. The fuzzy grey line around
"minimally" is becoming a war zone.
--
-george william herbert
I think you're understating the case here. It's not just a few things like album
covers or video game screen captures that requires fair use. It's basically anything
to do with commercial popular culture since 1923, just for starters and in the realm of
images.
And even if we manage to solve images, the real lurking issue here is of *text*. How much
fair use text do we have in Wikipedia? I can go to 10 random articles, find 2 or 3 fair
use images - but find a multiple of that of quotes and paraphrases. And it's worse
than with images, because at least with images we know images of pre-1923 matters to be
public domain, regardless of whether they were taken in the English-speaking world or no.
But how many of our quotes of, say, Sappho or the Dead Sea Scrolls, are *not* fair use
(even though the original long predates the first glimmerings of copyright)?
--
gwern
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