erik_moeller(a)gmx.de (Erik Moeller) writes: Right. We wouldn't restrict content based on what distributors in China or North Korea would be allowed to promulgate ...

Nathan Russell wrote: Fair use is only US. Britain is hardly Saudi Arabia or Noth Korea. Fair dealing is very different. I think tagging images with precise details of usage is the way forward. One problem with only allowing public domain images is that only the US government puts its images in the public domain. So only US articles will be properly illustrated. To be honest, I'd rather people were concentrating on unlabelled images. We can then decide whether we want to delete all the non-US images that are used with permission as that is the only way to use them. From this side of the Atlantic US fair use images are worse than ones we are legally allowed to use. We need to go on an image tagging drive. And then have the discussion ON THE WIKI so that the other 99% of users and contributors are aware of the debate. Even most adminsitrators don't contribute to the mailing lists.

Nathan Russell wrote: First, it's important to differentiate between content-neutral restrictions and content-based restrictions. There may be some overlap, but I think in the vast majority of cases, the restrictions we face will be largely one or the other. Content-based restrictions we must ignore whenever they conflict with our NPOV mission. If a government objects to our work on political grounds, that's tough for them. We are very strongly protected by the United States government in this matter. Some Content-based restrictions we may end up obeying, not out of respect for laws which violate the freedom of expression, but as a consequence of our NPOV mission. Both France and Germany have laws restricting the freedom of speech in various ways, but we are (in my opinion) unlikely to run afoul of those anyway, because we are an encyclopedia with an NPOV policy. For example, a British newspaper distributed in France was fined for calling Jacques Chirac a worm. That's an inexcusable violation of human rights on the part of the French government, but it doesn't seem likely to cause us any trouble since we srupulously avoid making ALL controversial claims. We would, of course, report on the flap, in a neutral manner, but French law is not (to my knowledge) an obstacle to that. Similarly, Germany has laws against some forms of expression relating to Naziism, but again, to my knowledge, so long as we stick to our NPOV mission, we aren't going to come close to violating those laws. (And, again, if we do, then we must ignore German law.) For content-neutral restrictions, for example extremely narrow fair use provisions, we will have to make some judgment calls, and we may have to be creative. We want to preserve maximal freedom for downstream users, while at the same time not hampering our NPOV and encyclopedic mission. For the most part, we can obey such restrictions without compromising our mission, since the restrictions are content-neutral. Is that explanation and distinction helpful? I think it's a mistake to think that British limitations on fair use that may be slightly (or greatly) more restrictive that U.S. law are in anything like the same category as speech restrictions in North Korea or China or Iran or Saudi Arabia, etc.. They aren't even in the same category as speech restrictions in Germany and France. --Jimbo

Optim wrote: I have no problem with fair use images, so for me banning them entirely would be unreasonable. There are just too many variables. Tagging strikes me as more sensible, with a wide variety of possible tags. The user could then decide on his own level of risk tolerance rather than having that decided by a handful of do-gooders who think they know the law. Ec