[Foundation-l] Banning Fair Use (was Re: Foundation Licensing Policy)

Wed Mar 28 13:56:00 UTC 2007

On 3/28/07, Robert Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> As I feared would be the case, this new foundation policy has become a
> call to arms by deletionists to institute a massive removal of all fair
> use content on all Wikimedia projects.  I don't know if this was the
> intent, but on at least en.wikibooks, the most active bureaucrat there
> has demanded that all fair use content be eliminated from Wikibooks. And
> has used this policy to strength his own counter claim that we should
> never have allowed fair use onto that project in the first place.
>
> With statements like "By March 23, 2008, all existing files under an
> unacceptable license as per the above must either be accepted under an
> EDP, or shall be deleted." seem to imply that unless you have already
> "approved" an EDP (whatever that means.... and the process of approval
> is certainly vague here) that all fair use can be retroactively deleted.
>
> Wikibooks has had an unofficial policy about fair use for more than a
> year now, and it has been used as a guideline.  Because of the earlier
> discussion about fair use that was started by Kat (before this policy
> was written), this same bureaucrat on Wikibooks also deleted and rewrote
> the fair use policy to simply say that fair use was banned, presuming
> authority on the part of the WMF.
>
> If this really is the intent of the WMF, I wish you would have just come
> out and said it simply:  "All fair use is banned."  I know that if this
> tactic were to be tried on Wikipedia that you would have an uproar from
> many users like has never been seen before.  But because this is a
> smallish project with only a handful of users who set policy, it makes
> it easier for some users to wildly mis-interpret what has been said.
>
> -- Robert Horning

No, it's not a call to ban all fair use. But it *is* certainly a call
to minimize it as much as possible and to treat it as inferior to free
content -- and an individual project is more than welcome to decide
that it does not want to use fair use at all. If Wikibooks does not
need it then by all means it should remove it; most of the Wikibooks I
have seen don't need non-free media as illustration, but perhaps there
are others that do. (And looking back now Greg has posted -- going by
the subject matter of the book is an interesting idea.)

Actually I find that people have been reading all sorts of things into
the resolution -- I have been throwing up my hands in frustration at
some corners of en.wikipedia proclaiming that because fair use was not
banned entirely it must mean we wanted more of it. The policy should
not actually be much of a change of anything, just set out a bit more
formally.

The basic idea is that this is what we have adopted as the definition
of free content; projects should treat everything else as very much
inferior to it, and use things outside that definition only where it
is not reasonably possible to avoid it.

-Kat

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