[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Dealing with a famous photographer

Sat Sep 2 19:15:03 UTC 2006

On 9/2/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> Regression? This is the status quo, as far as I can see.

I just wanted to expand on this somewhat pissy little ending line.

I think this will continue to be the status quo until we have some
more elaboration about what exactly our fair use policy is supposed to
facilitate.

There are a few tugging interests and I'm not ever really sure which
of them are more important than the others. One is illustrating the
encyclopedia (and I mean "illustrating" in a broad sense -- quotations
are fair use too). One is protecting Wikipedia's own liability. One is
protecting the hypothetical liability of hypothetical re-users.

At the moment our policies don't really differentiate between these
interests or encourage people to even be aware of them and how they
sometimes conflict with one another. I think there are ways in which
the policies could be made which would try to balance these out a bit,
but at the moment I'm honestly not always sure what the priorities are
supposed to be. I have some vague notions but usually feel like I'm
blue-skying it, making up most of it as I go along based on
somewhat-related comments by Jimbo.

In my view of it, if we want our policy to be centered around
re-users, then we need to define a target re-user, and work backwards
from there. But if the bar we set there is significantly higher than
Wikipedia's own situation, then we're going to need a lot of very
clear guidelines (probably from on-high) because it is going to lead
to a lot of irritated users.

If we are only really caring about our own rear, then our fair use
policy becomes an easy loophole for the
non-commercial/educational-use-only/with-permissions images.

FF