On Monday, September 12, 2005, at 11:54 AM, uninvited(a)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