[WikiEN-l] Fair Use suppression getting silly

Tue Sep 27 12:31:17 UTC 2005

Who is advocating this? I haven't seen anybody saying this on the talk
pages for WP:FU or WP:WPFU. None of the people I've seen who have been
involved in discussing fair use policy and tagging seem to be
advocating this in the slightest.

Anyway, the categories serve important organizational purposes which
outweight their very marginal danger of being related to any sort of
"fair use" problem in and of themselves. We need the categories to
assess and review "fair use" media in the first place -- the danger of
not having them (which would make monitoring impossible) is far
greater than the danger of having them. Categorization is just a form
of indexing, it is not the primary "use" of the images and I'm willing
to bet any judge with half a brain would know that. But again, I
haven't seen anybody honestly advocating this.

I doubt anybody would sue by saying "well, sure it's fair use in the
*article*, but the tiny icon-sized version they use to sort the
licensing status, that's what we think is infringing on our
copyright." They'd be laughed out of the courtroom, and they would
know that.

FF

On 9/27/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I can understand that using images willy-nilly in articles to which they
> bear only the most lateral of relationships might well give rise to a real
> problem, and I have no argument with the idea of removing such uses.
>
> However it would appear that some people are taking the argument to rather
> silly extremes. I have just discovered the school of thought that believes
> that including an image in a category contravenes the "Fair Use" principle
> because displaying the image on the category page amounts to using the image
> in an unfair way!
>
> Is it me, or is this just plain silly? A category is simply an
> organisational tool, not an article. Surely a case can be made that the
> proper categorisation of images within an encyclopedia is essential to using
> those images correctly.
>
> I was under the impression that ideally, **all** images should belong to at
> least one category, depending upon their licensing status. Obviously there
> are those who disagree.
> --
> Phil
> [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
>
>
>
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