[WikiEN-l] Fair use

Mon Sep 12 20:38:09 UTC 2005

On 9/12/05, uninvited at nerstrand.net <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
> I have been trying to form policy by working through issues on
> Wikipedia, but it is becoming clear that (a) the general opposition to
> deletion of anything, (b) the inability to undelete images, and (c) the
> lack of understanding of the nuances of U.S. copyright law are working
> together to prevent any useful work from being done by consensus.  I
> believe that leadership, and careful involvement of counsel, will be
> necessary to adopt useful policy.

Where exactly have you been trying to form this policy by working
through the issues? So far all I've you do is rewrite [[Wikipedia:Fair
use]], which was on the whole a good thing. (I thought there were a
few problems with it, which I posted on the talk page for half a week
before just changing the text myself since nobody responded one way or
another. Nobody has yet to respond, one way or another.)

I could be wrong, but it seems like you've nominated a whole single
image for deletion along these lines in the last two weeks. If you
think an image is a copyright infringement -- and doesn't qualify for
fair use -- why not tag it as such and mark it for deletion? I'd be
happy to chime in against people who blatantly don't understand the
legal issues in question.

You added your name to [[Wikipedia:Wikiproject Fair use]], which has
been quite active in rewriting fair use tags (and deleting problematic
ones), and is on the cusp of having a workable system for users to
label suspicious/disputed/approved fair use claims.

If you'd like to participate in the discussion, please do. There are a
number of people who are trying to draw up guidelines and feasible
plans. I'm not trying to sound snarky, but you're clearly aware of our
project, so I'm taking your complaining to the list as being some sort
of indication that you don't think it is in alignment with your goals
or thinking. There's a list of people on the page who have all
expressed interest and probably wouldn't mind being contacted if you
had some issue you wanted a lot of interested and informed opinions
on.

After some time assessing things, I think a great deal of our fair use
images are just fine. The vast majority of them are things like box
art and movie posters and are low-res, used appropriately in articles,
have no "free" replacements available, and don't deny anybody future
profitability. At the moment we've been mostly concentrating on
sorting these sorts of things out so that it's easy to see get to the
more problematic cases. These things take time, of course, and the
efforts of volunteers -- hence a coordinating project.

FF