[WikiEN-l] Reasons I care less about Wikipedia than I used to, No. 43

[Ken Arromdee]

On Sun, 18 Jan 2009, The Cunctator wrote:
> I think James's point is that wikilawyers have lost all perspective.

In this case, the image actually may be unusable even under fair use.  It's
the *real* law which has lost all perspective.  We have no choice but to
follow it.

But it is sort of amusing, because Wikipedia's image policy is ridiculously
strict and fails logic in several ways, yet can't be changed.  So now this
ridiculously strict policy is being applied more evenly than we'd have
expected and, of course, people are up in arms about it.

There's a good solution: don't have a ridiculously strict policy.  Even if
the Spider-Man picture is fair use in a legal sense (something I rather
doubt), it's hard to justify having it while still excluding fair use
photos of living people (probably the worst case) and all sorts of other
fair uses that we could legally have but aren't allowed by policy.

(And I never liked the Spiderman Reichtag joke anyway.  It seems to me a lot
like "look, we can violate the rules to be funny, and you can't!")