On 1/12/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris(a)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