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

Sat Nov 25 01:00:49 UTC 2006

On 11/24/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> George Herbert wrote:
>
> >Rancom vaguely related topic question - What is the right thing to do
> about
> >some obvious copyvios which I haven't figured out where the copying was
> from
> >yet?  [[Ship construction]] has a bunch of images which claim to have
> been
> >done as original Autocad work for Wikipedia, and yet are clearly scans
> out
> >of ship design textbooks, some of which I recognize, but I haven't
> figured
> >out which books yet.  The same person contributed them all, and some
> other
> >suspicious stuff.
> >
> There is nothing obvious about a copyvio when you can't identify its
> source.  You may have very strong suspicions about the matter, but that
> does not establish the fact.  I don't know what the standards are for
> drawings in ship construction, but I'm sure that there are bound to be
> some aspects that will be constant.  Are these even copyrightable?
>
> (resent) Ec

Well, we know for a fact that the credit (Autocad-self) is wrong, since you
can see the book's spine in the scans in several of the images, and the page
number in some as well.

These drawings, as engineering drawings, are as copyrightable as any other
technical document or drawing... completely, in the US.

In terms of the information within them, that's generally not copyrightable
or patentable or trademarkable - it might be a trade secret, but not after
being put in a published book.

If he *had* gone and redrawn them in Autocad or something, it would be
fine.  I've redrawn a number of illustrations in other technical articles to
do that.  But these particular images clearly are scans, and not redrawn.

It's remotely possible that they're scanned with permission, but they aren't
listed properly.  Given that you can clearly and obviously see the book in
the scans, and the claimed source clearly isn't, I was assuming that the
obvious conclusion was reasonably and necessarily that they're copyvios.

If WP policy is that I have to produce what they're violating for anyone to
take action, that's fine, but anyone who looks at them should be able to
tell that the claimed origin isn't, and that they came out of a bound book
via a scanner.  I find it hard to believe that anyone who actually looks at
the images could think they were autocad drawings.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com