On 25/09/2007, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
geni wrote:
On 24/09/2007, Omegatron omegatron+wikienl@gmail.com wrote:
The criteria for inclusion of media files in articles should be based not on prohibiting certain "non-free" licenses, but on *preferring* certain licenses over others.
That is already the case as far is allowed within US law.
Based on one reading of our various policies and guidelines, maybe. But in practice, certainly not.
It is widely acknowledged that our policy on fair use is considerably stricter than required by U.S. law.
That may not actually be true though. Album cover use in particular may be an issue. However CDCovers.cc didn't take the issue to court so I don't think there is any case law.
And we have several editors whose self-proclaimed goal is to eradicate every last fair-use image, no matter what. There seem to be two underlying motives.
And we have a rather larger number who disagree with them. Assuming no significant developments in case law I doubt we will see any further changes in our day to day fair use situation.
One is that we have to be nice to the downstream feeds; we have to make it maximally easy for them to use our content under their own perhaps even-stricter policies. Why it's our job to help them do this is never adequately explained. It's also never explained why we have to keep doing this in spite of our comprehensively fine-grained image licensing tags, which ought to allow any given downstream to filter out anything and everything they don't like. But that motive *does* keep getting mentioned, despite the existence of the tags. But it probably doesn't even matter in the end, given the existence of the second motive.
The more use able an encyclopedia is the better it is.
I'll be roundly condemned for saying this, but I believe that the second and stronger motive for being so rampantly anti-fair-use, for deleting all fair-use images now (instead of leaving them around until truly-free alternatives can be found), is that it helps push a POV agenda that the world's copyright laws and attitudes about copyright are wrong and need to be changed.
Nope. Most of the world doesn't have fair use. If you wanted a better conspiracy theory you might wish to consider the match between fair dealing and our fair use polices.
On a local level we have found we are more likely to get free media where non free media is forbidden.
That isn't to say we don't have a copyright agenda we do. We need to make sure that free licenses remain legal and that the public domain is not reduced any further in the US.
Wikipedia is now influential enough, and its GFDL ideals are already consonant enough with those which the anti-copyright brigade wants to pursue, that it's an extremely attractive venue for this agenda.
We accept copyright as is. The GFDL doesn't really work otherwise.
In fact, it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that the anti-copyright brigade has effectively hijacked Wikipedia for this purpose.
No we are not anti-copyright. By not accepting widespread fair use we say to traditional copyright holders "okey here's your ball we are going to play our game". We accept traditional copyright and in effect sidestep it.