[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?
Erik Moeller
erik_moeller at gmx.de
Thu Feb 19 16:36:09 UTC 2004
Jimmy-
> The moral argument is the one that matters. Should we make use of
> materials that are available only to us because of our special
> circumstances, or should we follow a purist GNU philosophy?
We should strike a reasonable balance, and that means that images which
are clearly unobtainable under a free license but historically important
works should be used as fair use. Copyright law is restrictive enough as
it is, it would be a big mistake not to exploit the few exemptions it
grants us, under the guise of being "more free". In fact, by rejecting
fair use, we effectively endorse restrictive copyright doctrines.
We have talked about this many times before, and I feel kind of bullied,
to be honest. You know the arguments for and against and I thought we had
found a reasonable compromise. Do the defenders of fair use images on
Wikipedia have to reiterate their position every 12 months to make sure
that *their* work is not destroyed, because our benevolent dictator
suddenly orders mass purges of all fair use images?
I am referring to the *work* of obtaining relevant images and including
them in the respective articles. I have scanned quite a few images
specifically for Wikipedia myself. You are not just talking about some
abstract issue, you are talking about people's time.
It is in our interest, as an encyclopedia, to make use of historically
relevant images, and it is our interest, as an encyclopedia, to rely on
the doctrine of fair use to do so. It is in our interest as an open
content project to make sure that we do not rely on fair use where we
could produce images ourselves. It is also in our interest as an open
content project to make it easy for third parties to filter out images
which they cannot legally use.
The solution, to me, therefore seems obvious:
- Develop a process whereby it is determined if an image can be obtained
by other means than fair use, and whether fair use is justifiable;
- Tag all fair use images to allow easy filtering.
Regards,
Erik
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