[WikiEN-l] Fair use images on user pages and enforcement

Thu Jan 12 23:04:06 UTC 2006

Sam Korn wrote:

>On 1/12/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>
>>Hi everyone,
>>
>>I'm just curious whether we have a policy on the use of fair use images
>>on user pages, rather than a guideline, and if so, what our procedure is
>>for enforcement of that policy if it says no such images permitted.
>>Obviously discussion is the first stepping stone, but if the user in
>>question refuses to remove it, what actions should admins take in order
>>to do so? I'm thinking of page protection and blocking here. I know
>>someone has been indefinitely blocked in the past because he did not
>>license his user page under the GFDL.
>>
>
>It's quite simple really.  Wikipedia's biggest reason for qualifying
>for fair use is that it is a free educational resource.  Userpages are
>just not educational.  User pages would, if I read the situation
>right, be very little different from a GeoCities website or the
>equivilent.  Image use would not qualify as fair use there; why should
>it here?
>
Seeing as how 99% of personal websites out there have images
infringing on somebody's copyright, most users have the impression
that nobody cares about the issue.

Perhaps it would be more effective to point out that WP is now a
high-visibility site, and that all the other sites at WP's level
(that are not personal page hosts) are pretty careful about copyright
and attribution. You could even ask the user to try to find even one
"fair use" picture on news.yahoo.com or some such, should drive the
point home.

Stan