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

Sat Sep 24 20:12:40 UTC 2005

Whether people will read it or not, having a set of concrete resources
can aid in discussions with obstinate users as well. Resources can be
forms of authority in and of themselves -- "Look at this, it says you
are wrong."

I don't participate in Meta, and I don't know what the gameplan is
there. And though copyright law applies to all of the Wiki projects,
it applies to them in different ways varying by their content. Commons
is exclusively about image and sound media; Wikisource is about
wholesale textual media; Wikiquote is about what degree of quotation
is copyrightable; etc. So I think having resources tailored to
individual projects makes sense, in the same sense that Wikiquote
ought to have its own Copyrights page distinct from Wikipedia's (which
it now does).

The goal of the resources I'm proposing is to focus on simplicity,
ease, and low-investment (of time, energy, brain, etc.) on the part of
the user. Whether some users refuse to make any use of it, I still
think on the whole it's not a bad idea and could be quite useful. But
it's just one of many such things.

FF

On 9/24/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Fastfission wrote:
>
> >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).
> >
> This is probably better placed on Meta since copyright law affects all
> projects.
>
> While I support the intent of what you are trying to do, the main
> problem will remain the unwillingness of editors to familiarise
> themselves with the law.  Whatever you may write about the subjec, will
> anybody read it.  As a result we find many unsupported radical positions
> at both ends of the scale.
>
> Sometimes I think that the IANAL argument or even more the YANAL
> argument sonds like an old lawyer trick to stop a discussion that nobody
> wants to face.  Although we now consider references very important in
> articles about most subjects, we do not take it so far as to say that
> the person to whom we refer must always be speaking the truth.  We
> recognise that he is expressing a Point of View; a Point of View from a
> position of expertise is still a Point of View.  We do not idolize the
> source, but see it in a broader perspective.  We refer not defer.
>
> Why should it be so different when we speak of lawyers?  To make matters
> worse we aren't even deferring to the Point of View of some particularly
> renowned or scholarly lawyer, but to lawyers in general.  It really
> comes down to how we as a group accept responsibility for our actions.
> Fair use does not excuse reckless irresponsibility.  It is a right which
> needs to be used responsibly.
>
> There is also a pecular trend in some of these discussions: We often end
> up discussing it in terms of the copyright on images.  This is certainly
> important, but the fundamentals of copyright law reside in the copyright
> of texts.  With a solid understanding of how copyright and fair use
> apply to texts it is much easier to migrate that understanding to images
> and other modern media.
>
> It makes sense that we should first consider this issue in terms of U.
> S. law; it originated there.  As the discussion matures there will be a
> need to expand it to be able to co-ordinate with similar laws (or lack
> thereof) in other countries.
>
> Let me speculate a little further.  Would there be enough material about
> fair use to have it serve as the basis for a Wikiversity course? 8-)
>
> Ec
>
>