[WikiEN-l] Re: New fair use tag proposal

Mon Jul 11 11:24:22 UTC 2005

I think these are good comments. One way around this might be to make
fair use tags require article names, i.e., {{fairuse|Article}}, which
would then start off by saying, "This page is copyrighted etc. but
thought to be fair use on the article {{article}}..."

FF

On 7/10/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/07/05, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Postscript:
> >
> > I also think it would be a good idea to create a template along the
> > lines of {{fairuse-reviewed}} which would contain the normal fair use
> > notice, as well as something like "The fair use criteria of this item
> > has been reviewed and found satisfactory by at least one other user."
> > or something like that. The process of reviewing fair use images would
> > then be one of converting {{fairuse}} tags to {{fairuse-reviewed}}
> > (after they had been reviewed). Perhaps a Wikiproject of some form
> > would be good for this? Anyway, it would allow us to keep track of
> > things. Just a thought.
> 
> I like this idea; might need a lot of manpower, though, and people do
> tend to have rather wide-ranging differences in how stringently they
> accept copyright restrictions. (I've more than once heard "well, it
> *should* be free" used to defend copyvios, and in one delightful case
> encountered someone who thought "in the public domain" meant *both*
> "this information is not secret" and "this information is free to
> copy"...). But I'd certainly be interested in seeing it work.
> 
> One fair-use problem, that I've been mulling over of late (I've been
> incommunicado for a few days), is that of context.
> 
> With something like a publicity photo of $celebrity, "fair use" is
> fairly incontrovertible. But... let's say we're dealing with the
> Lindisfarne Gospels, and the much-discussed photo thereof; assume it's
> tagged as fair use.
> 
> 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.
> 
> As I understand fair use - I don't claim to, one set of copyright law
> is confusing enough - it is quite dependent on the claim being a
> reasonable one in context.
> 
> But we'd have the one image, tagged as {{fairuse}} without that
> context; anyone wondering about using it in another article would
> simply see that we had it, it was under a legitimate-use license of
> some form, and slap it in their article, unless they were the
> introspective type given to considering license details.
> 
> 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.
> 
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>