[Foundation-l] Fair use being badly abused on en.wikipedia

[Wily D]

On Jan 7, 2008 4:12 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm less concerned with the Foundation being sued (because we are
> protected in most cases, both by our ability to respond to takedown
> notices and our educational purpose) and more concerned by the
> vulnerability of content reusers to suit. Our policy on free content
> is not to protect *us* - if that were the case, we could just request
> permission to use whole troves of content and be done. The policy
> protects those who, through our license, reuse our content for their
> own purposes. They are potentially much more liable to suit and this
> liability for them violates our goal to assemble a completely reusable
> base of knowledge.
>
> The best way to protect those who wish to utilize our content under
> its license is to ensure that we adhere to it - or change it. The best
> way to ensure our compliance is by guarding the insertion of non-free
> content - not laboriously deleting it once its eventually noticed.
>
> Nathan
>
>
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Indeed, reusers are the biggest reason fair use stuff has to be tagged
as such is for downstream users to remove it if they so desire (either
for ideological reasons, legal reasons or practical ones, or some
combination of all of the above - note we at Veropedia filter all such
stuff upon reuse for a combination of all three, for instance.)

That said, anyone who reprints Wikipedia without any editorial control
is exposing themselves to soo much more liability than copyright
infringement.  My guess is that requiring unfree content to be
pre-vetted would only increase the problem of incorrectly licensed
images (which you see a lot of by uploaders after their correctly
labelled stuff gets deleted) which'd increase the risk for downstream
users.  As it stands it's comparitively easy to remove fair use stuff
automagically if you don't want it there (although you'll necessarily
inheret a lot of copyright stuff that's mislabelled anyhow.

Cheers
WilyD