[WikiEN-l] Fair use

Mon Sep 12 19:33:21 UTC 2005

On Monday, September 12, 2005, at 11:54  AM, uninvited at nerstrand.net 
wrote:

> I have tried to make a difference in the handling of purportedly "fair
> use" materials on Wikipedia.  I believe that we have a plague of
> copyvio images, many of them bearing bogus fair use claims.
>
True... but as long as you have no approval process on images that are 
uploaded this will always be a problem.

> One of the problems is that there is no project-wide policy on the
> requirements for using fair use images.  The validity of a fair use
> claim is up to the uploader.
It's pretty good right now actually - you've got Carnildo and others 
making sure Featured Articles have good copyright stuff for their 
images.
>
> Though I am not an attorney, I am myself unconvinced that such things 
> as
> misappropriated news photos and graphics on current events, when
> appearing prominently in articles linked from the main page, and edited
> by many people, would qualify for OCILLA safe harbor provisions.  
> Though
> we have many dubious fair use claims, the ones involving recent news
> media images concern me the most because of the potential for bad press
> for us, and because of the potential case to be made for genuine
> monetary losses by news media that are in competition with the free
> information source we provide.

It's a dicey issue. It depends on a lot of things. I recommend actually 
contacting a real lawyer if someone's really concerned.

> Some basic things like deleting newly uploadeded, unsourced images 
> would
> be a start.

What happens if one of those images are valuable?? Doing this without 
some kind of "undelete" mechanism could be really bad.

>   So would a policy that states, specifically, that images
> taken from present-day news sources or wire services are against
> Wikipedia policy, regardless of the fair use case that the uploader
> thinks may apply.

How do you define "present day"? The only case for that and say, 10 
years ago, is that doing it now might cause more bad press... but if 
you're going to do this you may as well just prohibit it altogether.

Thanks,
RN