[WikiEN-l] Re: Fair Use suppression getting silly

Tue Sep 27 12:07:16 UTC 2005

On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 11:30 +0100, Phil Boswell wrote:
> "Andrew Lih" <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote in 
> message news:2ed171fb05092701414ca01dbd at mail.gmail.com...
> [snip]
> > If you write an article on the [[Ford Mustang]] and you use a photo
> > from ford.com claiming fair use, that's one thing.
> > If you use that same (or smaller) Ford Mustang picture on the
> > [[Category:Rear wheel drive vehicles]] page as an icon for the page,
> > that is gratuitous use.
> 
> No argument.
> 
> However this is not what I am referring to.
> 
> If you add [[Category:Pictures of Ford cars]] to that page, the picture will 
> then appear on the appropriate page **as a member of that category**. Not 
> illustrating the category...not describing it...simply as a **member** of 
> the category.
> 
> Some people seem to think that our Fair Use policy should be so draconian 
> that this kind of picture should not be allowed to belong to any category, 
> simply because the automatic display of the image's thumbnail on the 
> associated category page constitutes violation of Fair Use.

Its a process of working out a policy, rather than the current no policy
at all. No one is deleting stuff yet, just small amounts of things being
experimented for discussion reasons.

Some legal input would be very helpful right now.

The current situation is that fair use has got silly. And it has caused
a culture of pretty much anything is fair use. This has led to the
situation where even if you argue individually that one item is fair
use, you have now collected a database that in its entirety cannot be
argued to be fair use.

Justinc