[WikiEN-l] "Fair use" images of living people

Thu Nov 16 00:52:12 UTC 2006

On 11/15/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you wish to rethink your position or do you have counter evidence?

:)

Thanks Geni, although I'm not sure categories are the best way to
demonstrate this... I believe (and hope) that in every category of
'fair use images' there are some images which are being used
correctly. That is, the image is an excerpt of a copyrighted work
which is being used in an article which is providing critical
commentary of that work, and the excerpt is a necessary part of our
ability to educate on the subject.

It's my experience that there are even quite a fair use images which
are used in one place where there is a solid argument, as well as a
number of additional places where there is virtually no claim for fair
use.

Some categories are worse than others... Historically I found the
magazine covers to be pretty bad... often our use of the cover images
has been not to discuss the magazine but instead to compete with the
magazine more successfully by using their images for our coverage of a
common subject.

As an aside I find myself in an interesting position these days. I've
been more active in the commons community where I find myself
*defending* the concept of fair use images in Wikipedia, and then I
walk into En and find myself lamenting enwiki's current fair use image
status. :)

An interesting aspect of this is that the in Dewiki the articles which
I argue need to have fair use images have prominent external links to
someone elses copyvio.. while the enwiki articles which I argue use
fair use images unnecessarily tend to have free illustrations and
sometimes no illustration, but never external links in Dewiki.

This gives me confidence in the correctness of my position ... since
although I strongly support Dewikis view of maximizing free content
even at a substantial short term cost, I fail to see how we're
maximizing free content by externally linking to unfree content. :)