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

Wed Jan 18 19:46:44 UTC 2006

Justin Cormack wrote:

>
> With magazine covers, if we had say downloaded (made up example; I  
> havent
> looked into where they came from) the Official Playboy Magazine Cover  
> website
> and stuck them all in wikipedia then we would be liable - we would be  
> taking
> advertising revenue from their website thus causing damages.  
> Regardless of
> the amount of important critical commentary we make on them.

In theory yes, in practice the fair-use images are still pretty
thinly spread over our 900K+ articles. In my cleaning-out work on
the generic fair-use category I've only seen a handful of articles
that have more than one or two fair-use images, and they tend to be
articles on Pokemon characters and the like, where several stubly
articles have been merged into one (as per a common practice for
fictional characters).

Right now I think we're still in the process of figuring out much
we have and documenting the copyright holders. (The now-deprecated
category of generic fair-use images still has many thousands of
images left in it.) Once that's under control, I think we'll be in
a better position to focus on articles and areas that have excessive
numbers of copyrighted images. It wouldn't hurt to start a discussion
in the fair use wikiproject now, since it will likely take a while
to develop consensus on a good objective standard.

Stan