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

Thu Nov 16 19:16:36 UTC 2006

On 11/15/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's not hard (finally) to find examples where our policy has
> increased the pool of free content. I don't think you're disputing
> that from that perspective our policy wins.

I think the net reuslt of culling all images of people who are living
would be a decrease in overall article quality and the isolated
creation of a minimal number of replacements. I'm all for encouraging
people to replace images -- especially those which can be fairly
easily replaced with free ones -- but I think having ridiculous
requirements for what "reasonable" means doesn't help anybody. There
is, somewhere, a point where draconian policies arranged towards a
good end just end up wasting time which could also be spent towards
that good end (that is, the inefficiency and frustration of the system
impedes its functioning).

> == The legal ==

None of your legal examples have any relevance to the question of
whether or not we should ban all images of living people. They are
generally good things to keep in mind but they don't result in making
a draconian policy being sensible. There is no legal difference
between a unlicensed photo of a dead person and the unlicensed photo
of a living person -- the differences which might arise have nothing
to do with the photos replaceability or not.

> == The ethical ==
> No matter what your position is on the ethics of copyright in general,
> I suspect that if you think carefully you will agree that acting
> against the wishes of the producers of content is not the right thing
> to do.

Again, you are making general statements that do not justify this
approach to policy at all.

In both cases you are making general arguments against using "fair
use" media at all, which has nothign to do with this policy. This is
exactly the sort of "drift" of conversation that I was referring to
before.

One cannot reasonably discuss whether or not we should use "fair use"
at all and how to specifically implement "fair use" criteria at the
same time. They are different discussions, and using one to try and
slip in a new policy about the other is both complicating and
misleading.

In the end, in any case, if this were, in reality, what FUC#1 was
trying to do, then that should be discussed and ARTICULATED. As it is,
this interpretation of FUC#1 is simply added on as a throwaway line,
was not discussed in any detail, and is now being used to delete all
sorts of things as if it were gospel. That's a bad policy model, in my
opinion, but not too many people around here seem to care about what
it might mean to have a good policy model, in my opinion.

> and why now? when we're making such tremendous progress at getting
> Free pictures of famous people?

We should keep getting them and reward those who get them heavily
through our other mechanisms. We should not use the desire of free
images as an excuse to destroy all images which are non-free, unless
we are deciding to get rid of "fair use" alltogether. Which would be a
fine discussion to have but is not the one I am trying to have at the
moment.

I am of course fine with keeping our "ultimate intentions" in mind
when making policy. But when it comes to the protocols for
implementation, we need to keep in mind that Wikipedia runs on more
than just ideals -- it runs on users, and users are going to want
policy that makes sense, and they are going to want policy that does
not appear arbitrary. If we lose sight of that then Wikipedia will
only be a place for the sorts of people who like to endlessly haggle
over the internet and don't mind rules that don't make sense. I think
that is a stupid restriction to have.

FF