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

Mon Jan 7 22:56:36 UTC 2008

This is very true. I too am not as concerned about the legal repercussions
for the Foundation as I am the downstream users who potentially could
face a lawsuit from a company asserting their copyright.

However, there is an even bigger issue I don't think this thread is touching
yet, and that is our goal as an encyclopedia. We are (supposedly) here to
help produce a free encyclopedia. We are the freely licensed encyclopedia,
not the freely licensed encyclopedia with copyrighted images. At least we
shouldn't be. This is the major crux of the issue in my opinion. Personally,
I advocate /no/ fair use except in situations otherwise completely unavoidable
(and not having a picture of BoyBandXYZ is not such a situation). I'm referring
to situations such as major media events of which there are no free photos and
things of that nature. Maybe a few hundred or thousand for the entire English
Wikipedia, total. Not having a picture of every CD cover from every album will
not make us a less-complete encyclopedia. Sometimes when it comes to
free alternatives, there are none. Not having an image doesn't necessarily
make an article less informative. And only having 1 free image on an article
instead of 10 fair use ones isn't bad either.

I know the larger community disagrees with me, and fair use is pretty much
here to stay on en.wiki (unless a Board resolution mandates it). I just hope
the community can at least enforce the current standards, if not improve
them. I've always found this quote by Erik himself on fair use in the
encyclopedia to be rather accurate in how we should view this as a community:

>Well,
>perhaps you do not understand that Wikipedia is an open content project
>and intends to stay that way. The more non-free images we include, the
>harder it will become to distribute and re-use Wikipedia articles.
>Building an encyclopedia is only half of our mission -- our encyclopedia
>needs to be freely usable by everyone.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-April/009975.html

Always,
Chad H.

On Jan 7, 2008 4:12 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm less concerned with the Foundation being sued (because we are
> protected in most cases, both by our ability to respond to takedown
> notices and our educational purpose) and more concerned by the
> vulnerability of content reusers to suit. Our policy on free content
> is not to protect *us* - if that were the case, we could just request
> permission to use whole troves of content and be done. The policy
> protects those who, through our license, reuse our content for their
> own purposes. They are potentially much more liable to suit and this
> liability for them violates our goal to assemble a completely reusable
> base of knowledge.
>
> The best way to protect those who wish to utilize our content under
> its license is to ensure that we adhere to it - or change it. The best
> way to ensure our compliance is by guarding the insertion of non-free
> content - not laboriously deleting it once its eventually noticed.
>
> Nathan
>
>
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