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

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Jan 11, 2008 4:02 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've said this before, and appear to have to say it again.
>
> This encyclopedia's value lies not in our creation effort or the
> Foundation's existence - we're a service, and we're providing that
> service to normal people out in the world who want to look information
> up.

Yes, normal people out in this world, not "normal american people" or
"normal people from a select few commonwealth states". Fair use is not
a ubiquitous international right, and in many cases, there are people
who can't reuse our content because they are not permitted to use fair
use materials.

Wikimedia also specifically allows commercial use. We've gone out of
our way to make this clear, and the board has passed resolutions to
make this point unambiguous. The problem, again, is that fair use is
tricky to employ when talking about commercial use.

The final effect is that the more fair use we have, the less of our
material can be used properly.  Our core service (and I'm hesitant to
even believe that we are a service) is providing free information to
people. Our service is not the distribution of copyrighted materials,
nor the presentation of "pretty" information.

> Normal people overwhelmingly positively react much better to visual
> information and visual / text pairings rather than bland text.  In
> magazines and newspapers, articles with pictures are read and
> comprehended much more than pure text articles.  Images in other
> encyclopedias are a major "selling point".

You're ignoring the line between free and unfree images. Commons has
millions of free images, and none of these pose a problem. We can put
literally millions of images in our articles, and that puts us above
any beyond any other encyclopedia. You're saying that we need to use
copyrighted images, without explicit permission, because people prefer
the aesthetics of images. To follow the ideal of freedom of
information, i'm prepared to sacrifice a little bit on the
presentation.

> The last few arguments in this thread fall into a false dichotomy -
> you're trying to ignore or depreciate the value of images in making
> educational content reader-friendly and reader-attractive, in order to
> bolster your arguments in the "how free is free?" debate.  This is a
> horrible oversight and renders your stated position untenable.

There are some fair use images which are necessary and valuable. The
kinds of fair use images that people bring up when arguing in favor of
fair use are not the "average" type of fair use image that we have.
Raising the flag at Iwo Jima is a valuable image and makes our
encyclopedia better. Cover images of obscure books and CDs do not.
Pictures of fictional characters from old or obscure television shows
do not. There is a difference between images which are necessary, and
images which are used purely for decoration. The decoration images
should be removed.

--Andrew Whitworth