[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

Thu Feb 19 16:54:43 UTC 2004

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 05:36:00PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
> 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.

The only obvious solution is to delete all non-free images. That's the only
way of having content that's distributable worldwide for all purposes.

It's really hard to believe than anybody would think a couple more images
are worth sacrificing that.