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

[Sage Ross]

Greg, I agree with much of your analysis, but depart at a few points.

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>
>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...

It's true that the Signpost itself, much less non-free images in the
Signpost, are not strictly essential to the mission of Wikipedia. But
then, neither are most non-free images that we do allow.  Some images
are more essential than others; [[Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima]] is
quite a different matter from the typical article about a book or
album where the cover isn't explicitly discussed.  And for that
matter, many articles themselves aren't strictly necessary, insomuch
as inclusion policy is under-determined by the project mission and in
some ways arbitrary.  Essential-ness is relative.

I would argue that reviews of Wikipedia-related books are at least as
important to furthering the mission of the project as a lot of the
article space content that we categorically allow.

<snip>
> 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!")
>

It seems to me that book reviews are one area where both legally and
culturally, fair use has been pretty well carved out such copyright
isn't much of a restriction on freedom.  We're curtailing our own
freedom for the sake of painting a lot of different situations with
the same brush.

Nevertheless, I see that there's enough pushback from people who
recognize that an exception could be made in a case like this but
don't think it should be that I'll drop it.

-Sage