On 9/26/07, Thatcher131 Wikipedia <thatcher131(a)gmail.com> wrote:
James Hansen, NASA's chief global warming
scientist, has recently come
under press and blog criticism for supposedly warning about global
cooling in a 1971 Washington Post article. Yesterday I uploaded a
scan of the article
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hansen_Wash_Post.pdf) so the
actual facts could be discussed on the article talk page. (I believe
the recent coverage misrepresented Hansen's role as explained in the
article.) Even though I uploaded it with a Fair Use rationale, the
image police tagged it for deletion as a copyright violation.
I think this use of a copyrighted source, to inform discussion of the
topic on the article talk page, is closer to the spirit and intent of
the fair use doctrine than decorating articles with screenshots and
album covers. One purpose of the Fair Use exemption is to allow the
free exchange of ideas and information in scholarly discussion, and to
insist, in this case, that each editor interested in this article must
individually pay the Post for a copy, or find a library with the right
back issue, in order to participate, seems harmful to the project.
(When the Washington Times has a current article saying one thing,
the only way to show what the original article said is to either post
it or transcribe it, which is the same thing for copyright purposes.)
I have done this several times before, to allow informed discussion
of a disputed source on the talk page or on an AfD discussion.
However, there is no mention of this form of Fair Use on
[[Wikipedia:Non-free content]]. I'm curious about your reaction to
this, and whether some discussion of acceptable use of non-free
content on talk pages should be included.
Well if you want to split hairs on it, you'll notice that PDFs can't
be displayed ("inline") on any page in any namespace. So on one hand
it's not being "used" to "decorate" the talk page as only a link
to
the description page is provided. On the other hand, since it can't be
"used" to "decorate" anything, anywhere, it's technically and
perpetually an "orphaned fair-use" "image".
Judging by the deletion comment I'd guess that there was some degree
of misunderstanding.
Also I can almost guarantee that if you pasted the full text of the
Washington Post article on Mr. Hansen's talk page (for the purposes
you described above), nobody would think anything of it, regardless of
whether policy actually allows you to do this, which it probably
doesn't.
On a practical note, I'd say the average person would be more likely
to read the text in question if they don't have to fuck around with
adobe acrobat or whatever.
—C.W.