[WikiEN-l] New fair use tag proposal

Sun Jul 10 21:46:40 UTC 2005

You've raised some good points, Andrew.

> Even if would be fair use to use this to illustrate an article on the
> [[Lindisfarne Gospels]] (rare item, not much photographed, &c.)
> despite it being copyrighted... would it be fair use to use it to
> illustrate an article on, say, [[Rare-book photography]]? Sure, it's
> an example of such an image, but there's certainly thousands more of
> equal usability. How about using it to illustrate an article on
> [[Books]], or the [[Bible]]? Again, some relevance, but other images
> are just as good or better.

Indeed. Here's another example. I'd argue that it's
legitimate and inevitable fair use to use copyrighted
artwork by a living or "recently" deceased artist in
an article *about the artist*. Using it to illustrate
other articles is unnecessary and not appropriate.
Look at this image, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Branstock.jpg

If we were using it in an article about the artist
[[Alan Lee]] I'd say it was fine. But we're not.
Instead we're using it to illustrate articles on
Norse mythology. I don't know enough U.S. law to
know whether that's legal or not but it's certainly
not necessary.

And just so you can see how deep our fair use problem
goes this image was recently uploaded by User:Wiglaf,
who is an admin and an excellent editor (one I'm working
with all the time). I don't mean to slight him in any
way. In fact about half of the images in
[[Category:Images from Norse mythology]] were uploaded
by him and almost all are in the public domain.

This is also an education problem for those of us who
aren't legal types and/or who aren't from the U.S.
Scandinavian editors like Wiglaf and me hear that
Wikipedia is under U.S. law and that something
called "fair use" is okay. From how it seems to
be used on Wikipedia it's natural to assume that
it works something like this:

"You can use some copyrighted material without asking
for permission as long as you don't do too much of it."

But that seems to be pretty far from the truth.

So, the people in the know need to educate those of
us who aren't really.

> This may, potentially, be a problem with the way we tag things - fair
> use inherently seems to imply "in the context of the article for which
> it was originally used". It may be fair use the second time (and
> probably is), but may not... I don't know what, if anything, to do
> about this, but thought I'd kick it out.

Right. We don't really have a technical solution
to that within our present system. But if we're
going to go through all the fair use images and
add information to them we could make sure that
we explicitly mention that we've verified that
the image is fair use for pages foo, bar and foobar.
Anyone wanting to use the image on a new page
should then add to the image information page.

Regards,
Haukur