[WikiEN-l] Is a book cover in a Signpost book review an acceptable exemption from the non-free content policy?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 1:03 PM, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to get a little wider input on this issue.  Tony1 is
> reviewing a recent academic book about Wikipedia for the Signpost, and
> we'd like to include an image of the cover in the review:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Book_cover_O%27Sullivan.jpg
>
> Unfortunately, since the Signpost is project space, this violates the
> letter of the policy, but (in my view) neither the letter nor the
> spirit of the Foundation-level directives for non-free content.  Is
> this (and other Signpost book reviews in the future, perhaps) a valid
> case an exemption to the non-free content policy?

I certainly don't agree that it is.  The only justification for
including any non-free works on english wikipedia is that doing so is
widely accepted to be a necessity (on EN, at least) to accomplish our
stated mission as an encyclopaedia, and it so happens that kind of
necessity has long been understood by the lawmakers and the courts, so
that it's clearly permitted.

Both of these aspects are necessary components of the reasoning, and
it's not at all clear that the signpost is itself essential, even less
so that signpost being hosted by Wikimedia is essential, and I think
it would be patently ridiculous to say that the signpost being able to
use particular images is essential for the project mission...  as far
as I can tell the signpost almost never has images at all, even when
it easily could.

This state of affairs wasn't an omission in policy-crafting. There
have always been cases where people wanted to use illustrations which
were not freely licensed outside of main project development spaces,
including cases which were no less useful and no less noble than the
sign post. The prohibition on this usage is intentional.

Part of the notion behind being particular about non-project usage is
that it fosters a culture of being particular about copyright— without
an acute awareness of the restrictions that copyright can place on
usage, we couldn't hope to minimize problems which would diminish the
usefulness of the project. The tighter rules outside of project space
give us an opportunity to hone our skills on alternatives and dispense
some nit-picking energy in a place where it doesn't harm the end
project. It also helps make it more clear that the state of the rest
of the project is a reasoned compromise between extremes. ("See, our
acceptance of non-free works doesn't mean we hate freedom. We have a
hard prohibition against it everwhere else!")

Beyond all that—   I don't think I could make an honest argument
against an indifference to the use of licensed works on userpages
which didn't also say that a decision to allow it on signpost was also
in the wrong.   About the best I could offer is that we could
reasonably police the signpost usage to make sure that it was lawful
and minimal, even without a bright-line prohibition, while doing the
same for user-pages is a substantially harder task (and proven by
experience to be basically impossible)... but I can't see a reason
that we should afford the opinion pieces in the signpost any special
privileged compared to the opinion pieces people write on their
userpages, essays, or comments elsewhere.  "It's only tractable if we
only allow one" isn't a particularly fair position to take, true as it
may be.