[WikiEN-l] Re: "Fair use" images now allowed in userspace?

Fri Dec 30 13:37:00 UTC 2005

jkelly at fas.harvard.edu wrote:
>   It seems to me that this represents a philosophical shift away from a
> radically open-licensed project.  Nor is it clear to me that the desire to
> decorate ones userpage with official logos should be driving precedent.  I may
> be confused about the mission of our project, and am hoping that by posting
> this to the list those users who have more history with Wikipedia's
> relationship to unfree copyrights might do some thinking about the situation.

I have a photo of myself on my user page declared "fair use" for the 
sole reason that I don't want it to be freely redistributed. The photo 
was taken by a good friend of mine, and I'm sure I could talk him into 
releasing it under whatever license I asked for, but for privacy reasons 
I would prefer it if that photo (and other such images) were restricted 
for use within the Wikipedia community, and were kept out of the article 
namespace or any other publications.

I was surprised to find a deletion template on the image, but frankly, 
I'd prefer to see it deleted than have it freely plastered all over the 
web. Hopefully, however, Wikipedia can find some compromise between the 
copyleft fundamentalists and those like me who believe that a 
psychological separation between public and private space is important. 
Given the objections to the posting of meetup photos which have arisen 
at the past, I don't believe I'm alone. I think this concept of a 
balance between freedom and privacy is one which could use some more 
discussion.

-- Tim Starling