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

Sat Jan 12 18:29:41 UTC 2008

On Jan 12, 2008 3:36 AM, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org> wrote:
> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>
> >On Saturday 12 January 2008 09:03, Pedro Sanchez wrote:
>
> >> "I find it useful " is not likely to fly in a court
>
> >So what?
>
> Wikinews had this fight. I unilaterally amended the copyright message at the
> foot of every page and had no dispute. It now reads: "All text created after
> September 25, 2005 is available under the terms of the Creative Commons
> Attribution 2.5 License unless otherwise specified. Copyright terms on
> images may vary, please check individual image pages prior to duplication."
>
> There is a warning that we use fair use, and for a news source this is
> *very* important. I've had fights with people from Commons who are 'more
> zealous' about application of Fair Use, and realistically nobody has
> answered my fundamental question which is the time issue.
>
> If we write an article on Hilary Clinton and can only get a fair use image
> in the 12-36 hours the story is current, is it appropriate to replace that
> image in 10 years with a current image? Remember, this would be on an
> article dated January 12, 2008 with the potential replacement being in 2018.
>
> I have very little to say on how this impacts other projects such as the
> English Wikipedia. I've uploaded album covers there myself, I think they
> belong there.
>
>
> Brian McNeil
>
>
>
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If you can't find a free image, why not go no image? I'd imagine the
Foundation's resolution applies just the same to Wikinews, and it's
pretty clear on replaceable nonfree images (i.e., don't use them). An
image of a living person who probably has thousands of federal
government images taken of her (all in the public domain) is about the
very definition of "replaceable".

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.