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

Sat Sep 24 21:34:34 UTC 2005

A just to reply to two things I didn't really get to in the last one...

On 9/24/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> 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.

I think it is a bit incorrect to give texts a privileged place in this
-- images of all sorts, as well as texts, have been components of
copyright law since their very origins, and the chief reason images
occupy so much attention on our project is that copyright law affects
different media differently. It is very easy to take any textual
information and, for the purposes of the encyclopedia, make it
entirely safe and sanitary. The use of attributed brief quotations and
summaries is a well-established part of academic critique and "fair
use" even before there was a "fair use" clause. Graphical media though
is more difficult to transform -- a redrawing of a famous painting
would still be considered derivative in the eyes of the law (though to
the varying extents depending on the specifics). Photographs,
especially of historical events (which by their definition cannot be
repeated), cannot be easily "freed" unless their copyrights expire
(which for things post-1922 has not happened for a long time and will
not likely happen for a long time) or they are specifically
re-licensed or put into the public domain (and more likely the rights
are just sold to Corbis for a nominal fee, who then puts ridiculous
commercial restrictions on their licensing).

For Wikipedia, text is not a big deal. (For Wikiquote and Wikisource,
it is the only deal, of course, as I said before). Images, however,
are a big deal, and on Wikipedia they are, in my opinion, more of a
big deal than they are on Commons (which under more ideal management
would have a strict and simple shoot-on-sight policy to maintain
copyright-purity), because it allows "fair use" images in the first
place. (It is a big deal with Wikinews too, of course, but I think
their shoot-on-sight policy looks pretty good, in theory.)

So anyway. All I'm trying to stress is that copyright *does* affect
certain media differently than others, as does "fair use" (you can use
a few seconds of a sound clip, but using a few pixels of an image
doesn't seem to be quite the same thing, and text you can paraphrase
completely and cite). Sorry to be so pedantic and tedious about it.

FF