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

Thu Nov 16 21:32:44 UTC 2006

On 11/16/06, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't follow what this has to do with OTRS.

Because I thought you were complaining about actual attempts to get
license releases from folks, which should have ultimately resulted in
OTRS permissions emails which I could look and get input on how to
make our requests easier for rights holders to understand.

> My question was: who are the potential beneficiaries of the
> free-licence images that increasingly we insist on having?

I missed that you were only asking that, I thought you were trying to
complain about how challenging it can be to get appropriate
permissions...

Who benefits? The world.

> We're
> insisting on free licences even in situations where we know the
> copyright holder doesn't mind,

Doesn't mind what?

Doesn't mind using making modified versions? Doesn't mind us selling the images?

If they honestly don't mind, then getting them to make a clear
statement shouldn't be a problem.

>and where there's therefore no legal
> problem with claiming fair use.

Legal ability to claim fair use is completely orthogonal with the
copyright holders willingness.

The point of fair use is that under fair use you can use the material
when the rights holder says no.

Did you miss my point about the importance of avoiding being liked by
the rights holders in maintaining neutrality?   Or perhaps you'd
rather we were driven by copyright concerns to uphold PETAs views even
when they are at odds with a neutral coverage because our our usage of
so many of their images?

> Who is our audience, in other words;
> what is our market?

We endeavor to create an encyclopedia of Free Content for the world.
It is not sufficient to merely place knowledge behind a glass wall of
intellectual property, so that the people of the   world may look but
not touch.  The world already has fine examples of that in commercial
encyclopedias. To go beyond that we must produce a resource which will
be owned, equally, and in perpetuity by all the people of the world so
that they may use it, share it, and benefit from it, in any way that
they see fit.

In a few short years we have created so much free work. It would seem
foolish to not take every effort to ensure that the greatest amount of
the total can be easily used as freely as the majority so that it may
be enjoyed by as many people for as many purposes as possible.

Wikipedia will be around 100 years from now, and hopefully still going
strong.   I see no cause to walk away from free content because in a
few cases it will allow us to speed things up a little.  Certainly not
now, .. not after we've proven that competent photographers would want
to contribute.. not after we've proven that we can get excellent
photographs of famous people..

> As I said, responsible publishers who want to use
> our material won't trust what we say regarding free licenses: they'll
> make their own licensing enquiries. And irresponsible publishers won't
> care. So who are we doing it for?

Are they to make these enquiries years after the source has died?  Do
we expect a publisher to contact dozens of rights holders just to
republish a *single* Wikipedia article.. people whom we already should
have contacted for our own usage?  That would seem to be very
inefficient.

Considering that my contributions are available on many websites who
have mirrored and excerpted from Wikipedia and the only rights
requests I've ever had were from people who wanted the ability to use
my works commercially without attribution, I think you're assuming
publishers are able and willing to do more work than they actually
are.