On 1/5/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Fastfission wrote:
>Mainly because a large deal of our feeling confident that our use of
>unlicensed copyrighted material is "fair" is that it is purportedly for
>"comment and criticism." This approach seems backed up by a number of
>informed sources, i.e.
>http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-a.html#1which
>lists "Comment and Criticism" and "Parody" as the two primary
>categories of things which receive legal blessing for "Fair use" claims. I
>think most people have a pretty poor view of what counts legally as the
>latter (most seem to think it just means "used in a funny way" which is
not
>at all how the courts interpret "parody"). As for the former, the Stanford
>page says:
>
>"If you are commenting upon or critiquing a copyrighted work--for instance,
>writing a book review -- fair use principles allow you to reproduce some of
>the work to achieve your purposes. Some examples of commentary and criticism
>include:
>
> - quoting a few lines from a Bob Dylan song in a music review
> - summarizing and quoting from a medical article on prostate cancer in
> a news report
> - copying a few paragraphs from a news article for use by a teacher or
> student in a lesson, or
> - copying a portion of a Sports Illustrated magazine article for use
> in a related court case.
>
>The underlying rationale of this rule is that the public benefits from your
>review, which is enhanced by including some of the copyrighted material.
>Additional examples of commentary or criticism are provided in the examples
>of fair use cases in Section C."
>
>Now whether we achieve this in the article namespace is of course often
>under discussion. In the User and Template namespaces media is primarily
>used for decoration and personalization. This would not seem to fall under
>the above descriptions even in a very optimistic approach.
>
>Unfortunately the Stanford Fair Use case summaries page has almost nothing
>relating to using images on webpages (only the "thumbnailing" case which
is
>not quite the same thing) so it is hard to know what sort of precedent one
>would be fallnig back upon in either direction. I know a few cases offhand
>but I'm not a lawyer and it is hard for me to sort through what is most
>relevant and what would not be.
>
>This is, anyway, my understanding of what the policy is based upon, for
>better or worse. There is also a crude risk/benefit equation going on here.
>There is simply no compelling reason to allow unlicensed, copyrighted images
>in the user namespace, and a number of reasons to be suspicious of it.
>
I think your last paragraph is the most convincing argument, actually.
There isn't much of a compelling reason to allow these images, at
least not the ones which don't intend to ever be put into an article.
I don't really buy into the whole "using these images is illegal"
argument, but if removing the images pleases those who are copyright
paranoid and it doesn't hurt anything otherwise, I guess it's the
right thing to do. It'd be nice if there was an easy way to undelete
images, though.
Anthony