On 6 Dec 2005, at 03:12, Fastfission wrote:
On 12/4/05, Puddl Duk <puddlduk(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I think we have almost 600 fair use images in the
pokeman category
That's true, and may or may not be a problem. The sheer number isn't
necessarily the problem, though -- images which are individually "fair
use" are still "fair use" whether there are two of them or 600 of
them. There is a case on this relating to Beanie Babies, I believe:
Ty, Inc., vs. Publications International, Ltd. (discussed at
http://www.ivanhoffman.com/beanie.html)
Not having 600 can be more significant than having one: it is the use
as a whole which will be taken into account; the extent of the copying
includes collections in many cases. The Beanie Babe case is not
necessarily
applicable (although it might be) as it relied on 2D photos not being
substitutes for 3D dolls; we normally rely on being able to take
pictures
of 3D objects anyway without infringement. The problem with the Pokemon
is that the actual images are also straight copies (not artistic photos
off a screen say), and to some extent images on a screen of pokemon do
substitute for the originals, certainly more than Beanie babes do.
There is also the trademark infringement issue (which was not used in
Beanie Babes, but I would not be surprised if Pokemon fell into this.
But its unclear.
How the Twin Peaks and Seinfeld rulings apply to
Wikipedia and
Wikiquote is unclear to me. Personally I'd be very, very suspicious of
having detailed pages about copyrighted material which is purely
descriptive (and not analysis, parody, etc.) or, at worse, relies upon
heavy use of copyrighted content (images, quotes), even if we are
non-profit. But I'm no lawyer, and this seems to be ground which is
not very clearly spelled out legally.
I hope we are unlikely to get to the stage of Twin Peaks, ie almost
copying in scripts.
This is nice and cheerful:
http://www.ivanhoffman.com/screen.html