[WikiEN-l] "Fair use" abuse on user pages

Sat Sep 24 16:43:52 UTC 2005

Just as a note: I created a sub-page at WP:WPFU,
[[Wikipedia:WikiProject Fair use/Explaining fair use]], for the
purposes of exploring ideas and coordinating human resources towards
creating easy to understand resources to explain fair use and
copyright law as it applies to Wikipedia. As I currently see it, the
goal of such a project would be as follows:

> Wikipedia users on the whole do not know much about U.S. copyright law, and are thus generally not very empowered to make reasoned decisions about whether something is "fair use" or not. This often leads to rather bitter arguments between users, which generally collapse as one party notes that the other is not a lawyer and thus not an authority on the topic.

> It would be more ideal if there were easy, straightforward references which one could refer users on Wikipedia to which would explain the notion of copyright, "fair use", and their applications to Wikipedia in a manner which would not require any experience in legal reasoning or a large time commitment.

It's of course very underdeveloped at this point, but anyone
interested in such a thing should stop on by. Some current ideas I
listed were graphical explanations, checklists, flowcharts, a
Wikibook, improved descriptions on the relevant policy pages, etc., as
well as some links I find useful in thinking about "fair use" (which
are still a bit too technical for the average Wikipedia user, but
closer to what I am imagining we need than a simple quotation of the
"fair use" clause of U.S. copyright law).

FF

On 9/22/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was actually thinking to create a flowchart for people to easily determine
> the copyright status of images, but lacking the legal know-how, I haven't
> done it.
>
> Not only would such an aid in determining image status be helpful to people
> who are new to legal issues on this, it could also be used as an argument to
> not allow images that don't get through this process for being a copyright
> infringement or faulty fair use claim.
>
> We should also have a page saying how we should only have limited fair use
> images on articles (and not on userpages) where there's no other
> alternatives or 1 such image in an article when it explains a lot (again, if
> there's no other choice).
>
> --Mgm
>
> On 9/23/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 9/22/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > I agree completely. Last time I checked, the deletion policy is very
> much
> > > so
> > > biased toward keeping everything by requiring a supermajority to delete.
> > > It
> > > should be the other way around whenever a fair use claim is made.
> > >
> >
> > Remember that a fair use claim would come under the Copyright policy,
> which
> > being a key policy takes precedence over the deletion policy.
> >
> > In short, if someone makes a fair use claim they should need a consensus
> to
> > support it if anything.
> >
> > Under deletion policy, the rule is "if in doubt, don't delete." The
> > copyright policy should adopt the reverse approach. Wikipedia is known for
> > the quality of its product. Let's not ever risk it being known as a
> > purloiner of other people's hard work.
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