On 0, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com scribbled:
On 7/12/07, Zoney zoney.ie@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 SAI Information Warfare IW IS Privacy Information Terrorism Kenya Terrorism