[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

Thu Feb 19 16:36:09 UTC 2004

Jimmy-
> The moral argument is the one that matters.  Should we make use of
> materials that are available only to us because of our special
> circumstances, or should we follow a purist GNU philosophy?

We should strike a reasonable balance, and that means that images which  
are clearly unobtainable under a free license but historically important  
works should be used as fair use. Copyright law is restrictive enough as  
it is, it would be a big mistake not to exploit the few exemptions it  
grants us, under the guise of being "more free". In fact, by rejecting  
fair use, we effectively endorse restrictive copyright doctrines.

We have talked about this many times before, and I feel kind of bullied,  
to be honest. You know the arguments for and against and I thought we had  
found a reasonable compromise. Do the defenders of fair use images on  
Wikipedia have to reiterate their position every 12 months to make sure  
that *their* work is not destroyed, because our benevolent dictator  
suddenly orders mass purges of all fair use images?

I am referring to the *work* of obtaining relevant images and including  
them in the respective articles. I have scanned quite a few images  
specifically for Wikipedia myself. You are not just talking about some  
abstract issue, you are talking about people's time.

It is in our interest, as an encyclopedia, to make use of historically  
relevant images, and it is our interest, as an encyclopedia, to rely on  
the doctrine of fair use to do so. It is in our interest as an open  
content project to make sure that we do not rely on fair use where we  
could produce images ourselves. It is also in our interest as an open  
content project to make it easy for third parties to filter out images  
which they cannot legally use.

The solution, to me, therefore seems obvious:
- Develop a process whereby it is determined if an image can be obtained  
by other means than fair use, and whether fair use is justifiable;
- Tag all fair use images to allow easy filtering.

Regards,

Erik