[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

Thu Feb 19 16:57:32 UTC 2004

Hi,

> 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.

I agree 100 % with that.
Replace fair use images with free one when possible,
and use fair use it when we can't avoid it.

> Regards,
>
> Erik

Regards,
Yann

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