[Foundation-l] Fair use being badly abused on en.wikipedia

Mon Jan 7 20:52:34 UTC 2008

On Jan 7, 2008 12:08 PM, Brian Hammer <hammersoft123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 7, 2008 2:03 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > When assessing risk, you need to consider not only the cost of
> > something going wrong (in this case, clearly quite high), but also the
> > chance of it happening. How far would a policy of complying with all
> > but the most outrageous cease and desist notices go towards reducing
> > that chance? In other words, would be a good idea to not worry about
> > the borderline fair use cases until someone complains? What's the
> > chance of us ending up in court even after removing the image in
> > question?
>
>
> "They would never sue!" is a very poor position to take.

Though fair use (for all users) is embedded in statute (in the US),
the way it's done is that it's an affirmative defense, rather than an
inherent right.

In other words, they can *always* sue, but under some circumstances
their case is (rebuttably) inherently rather weak.

Note that mere publication of an image under a free license may not
prevent lawsuits either.  Who here really knows that an image was
taken by the person who claims credit?  An artist / copyright holder /
creator can always discover that someone else claimed credit or tried
to put something out under unapproved licenses or so forth.  That
results in lawsuits, too.

And we have this problem with text as well, given that we do find
clear copyvio text cut/paste into Wikipedia at regular intervals.

Trying to live your life in a way that nobody can ever sue you is
impractical and a poor life choice.  Living your life in a way that
you respect others' rights,and intellectual property freedoms in a
balance and being educational and generally open will minimize risks.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com