On 9/26/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/09/2007, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
In what way are they an issue?
1)there appears to be a market for low res album covers
How does this impact our use of album covers under fair-use?
2)the shear number of them we use
This is due to the the shear number of albums in Wikipedia.
3)the lack of commentry on the cover art in articles.
The majority of our hosted cover art are due to us having an article about the work. Fair-use on the article about the album can be minimally justified as for identification purposes. Not ideal, but also not disputable. As a result, it should be clearly undesirable to delete images of album covers where we have an article about the album, or expect to in the near future. Yet they are deleted from the fair-use pile on a daily basis. Of the 100 images in [[Category:mages with unknown copyright status as of 18 September 2007]] when I looked this morning, five appeared to be album covers, and they were all deleted (as many logos were also deleted):
[[Image:Trapt LIVE!.jpg]] [[Image:Sugababeschangeofficial.jpg]] [[Image:Thevines highlyevolved.jpg]] [[Image:Evanescencecover.jpg]] [[Image:66 chobits002.jpg]]
Obviously we would prefer a commentary to strengthen our fair-use claims and to improve our encyclopedia. Necessary improvements in articles can be noted and managed with tags. I wouldnt be surprised if there was a group of Wikipedians that would love to work on [[Category:Album articles with cover art in need of commentary]].
Things like [[Abbey Road (album)]] are not a problem but [[Endless_Love_soundtracks]] is (ignoreing the other problems with that article).
Obviously unnecessary. Do we have bots/tools tracking cases like this where non-free media is being used on articles without a fair-use rationale?
Have we had any complaints?
Honestly interested..
I don't belive so. However sites with simular content have had issues in the past:
Thanks. That does look like a concern. Where they hosting high res images? Do we know why they were targeted?
However, the recent practise is to replace AGF with bots because they cant assume, judging good in black and white, and dont have time for the messy business of intentions. The balance has shifted without consensus due to the efficiency of the bots, and the backlogs they cause. Admins clearing those backlogs on Wikipedia rarely spare the time for the easy cases such as logos, PD images that can be detected with the human eye and brain
PD images should not be turning up in the fair use pile.
I have seen them in the fair-use pile, and I have put some in the fair-use pile because I wasnt adequately confident that PD applied.
The "no license pile" is treated with even less care. Automating the tossing of images onto piles considered to be junk inevitably leads to this, and taking them off that pile is difficult work.
For example, before breakfast [[en:Image:Edward_Ginn.jpg]] ([[Edwin Ginn]]) was also in the nld pile for September 18; not surprisingly it was deleted by the time I came back from breakfast. It takes time to figure out whether an image is PD, or failing that to justify that the image is not replaceable.
and user contributed images that are almost certainly intended to be donated to Wikipedia under any license, except that the new user has no idea how to do that.
The legal situation with regards to these is so messy such images are best deleted.
No. We should require that they are put onto a separate pile, and reasonable attempts are made to contact the uploading user. As it is, there is little point contacting the user as another admin will delete the image before the user has responded and understands how to address the license problem.
The more use able an encyclopedia is the better it is.
In context of the email you responded to, this is an argument for gracefully degrading when images cant be used. We can, and should, have the 1000 words as well as the image. Free images are of no use to the blind.
That is not a copyright issue.
Only if you dont want it to be.
The context was that we do not need to be responsible for all possible downstream copyright limitations. We can and should do everything possible to ensure that where there are limitations, downstream users are able to use our metadata to easily comply.
Adding this metadata makes our encyclopedia more re usable.
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.
Does this mean then that you want the English Wikipedia to have our non-free media limited to the intersection of all non-free laws across the globe?
No
Then I misunderstood your comment. What type of non-free do you want protected and encouraged on English Wikipedia?
Has an analysis been done on what provisions for non-free will be left if that was adopted ?
No because no one has suggested it.
I expect that this would exclude all satire, and probably many other types of reuse allow for by common law. A more workable approach would be to limit non-free to the provisions in the country of origin where also permissible in the host country USA. A lot of our fair-use media originates from the USA, so this would mean that fair-_use_ is still acceptable in those cases.
I really really don't feel like trying to trace all unfree images to country of origin and then haveing to learn any more elements of french law than I've already needed to.
You personally don't need do all this for my suggestion to be workable. We have residents of France amongst us, and it only takes a few copyright savvy people in each country for the rest of us to know the clear cases. For jurisdictions where we dont (yet) know the boundaries of acceptable non-free, we would err on the side of caution and reject dubious non-free.
Again, I think that dragons be there, and we are on safer ground by finding ways to include most image where USA fair-use applies, and ensure that the encyclopedia gracefully degrades where an image may not be used.
There are over 100 legal systems on this planet. Have fun working that one out. While most of the former british empire has fair dealing based systems there are the other european empires to consider as well as all the local modifications.
Time is on our side.
This would of course be coupled with measures to tag images that are replaceable and try to find replacements as soon as possible.
Been suggested from time to time.
On a local level we have found we are more likely to get free media where non free media is forbidden.
{{fact}}
See our living people bios. Used to be almost every pic of non US gov person was non free. Now this is not the case and images numbers in that area are riseing again.
I attribute that more to the growth of our Commons project; the body of readily accessible knowledge about what is "free" in other countries, and a strong team of people dedicated to finding assisting people find and upload free content. Deleting a set of non-free images "resets" the project a little, and of course the second time Wikipedians are likely to do a better job, and will try to find a free image with assistance of the Commons community.
The same result could also be achieved by identifying types of readily replaceable free images, listing them all and driving the list down to zero.
Forbidding non-free media has a cost of churning through non-free images,
Fairly low once people get that we are serious about this free media thing.
We are serious about it. There is a project dedicated to it.
or uploading historically valuable works to Wikisource, or writing more free content on Wiktionary, Wikipedia and Wikibooks. As you know, putting works on Wikisource also usually involves adding free media to the commons, and expanding Wikipedia increases the visibility of Wikimedia, in turn promoting the addition of free media by new contributors.
No. You get free media from new contributers by sending a clear signal. Allowing unfree media does not help with that.
At present, we scare new contributors away. Even if a new user makes it through the upload form, it is quite probable that they wont tag it sufficiently or be able to work out how to add it onto the article, and it will probably be deleted anyway.
We need to be careful not to put free media ahead of the other free content.
We put it considerable behind.
No; we strongly prefer free media, and have a project dedicated to cultivating it.
We accept copyright as is. The GFDL doesn't really work otherwise.
Right, nobody who is well informed in this debate is against copyright; we all know that it underpins our daily contributions. Most of us have been around long enough to intimately understand the basis, motivations and long term effects of different copyleft strategies. The debate here is similar to the nature of the "open source" vs "free software" debate, only in this case it is "fair use/dealing is a human right" vs "free content".
That would suggest that I accept that "human rights" have some kind of real existance beyond people's power to enforce them. I do not.
By qualifying and using them appropriately, we strengthen the ability and resolve of the wider public to keep fair-use alive. This in turn keeps copyright laws in check and ensures that copyright holders know that if they want to control all access, they should keep their works out of the public eye.
We are all on the same side, but have differences on the priorities and how we should act in the short term in order to promote the same long term goals.
For my part, it is the current practices for removing fair-use that concern me, as I am happy with the policy of limiting replaceable fair-use. I think upload limitations may even be necessary to keep fair-use manageable, perhaps using the upcoming flagged revisions improvements to build better heuristics into MediaWiki to determine when a user should be prevented from uploading more images.
We do not have the ability to only block people from uploading.
Software can change. What limitations on uploading would you like to see in the software?
Another solution is to put more eyes onto the problem sooner by enhancing the upload function so that, on enwiki, it is an action associated with articles. All new images could initially be placed onto a gallery tab of the associated article, and these uploads would then appear on the Watchlist of people who potentially care about the image. This would hopefully ensure that images are quickly investigated, cleaned up, properly tagged and put to good use, or pushed into the deletion queue because the image itself isnt desirable.
Generaly experence suggests that copyright is best delt with by people who don't otherwise generaly interact with the article. See wikiproject clasical music's attempt at a copyright policy or the issues that complicated what was copyright wise a fairly straightforward case with regards to [[:Image:AntiWarRallyFeb162003.jpg]]
Strong opinions from motivated individuals are not avoidable. Deleting images before they notice only results in churn and resentment. It is better that they are aware of new images as they are uploaded, and are forced to pick and choose. Also if new images are seen by more eyes on upload, and they are tied to a specific article, we can strengthen the image CSD to allow deletion of unjustified fair-use on sight rather than wait seven days.
A natural extension of this would be to limit the image to that one article until it can be verified as free content, or a fair-use rationale's for another article has been assessed & approved.
So people upload it twice under different names.
This is a lesser evil that can be discouraged, identified easily and fixed with no harm done.
-- John