[WikiEN-l] Google Earth copyright (now that you bring it up)

Fri Jan 20 22:56:09 UTC 2006

On 20 Jan 2006, at 22:41, Stan Shebs wrote:

> Justin Cormack wrote:
>
>> What does a book cover add to an article on War and Peace?
>
> If nothing else, it makes it clear that the article is about the
> book, not the movie, or the board game, or the ...

Image worth one word. Even that might not be clear.

> Now, what does the Abbey Road album cover add to its article?
> Quite a bit it turns out - the article even has a section entitled
> "The famous photograph".

Yes, but these few real uses are swamped by the rubbish ones.

>>
>> Most uses are just decoration, and they are stopping free images
>> being used to replace them. You can be quite lateral with  
>> illustration.
>
> Where are you expecting to get free images with which to illustrate
> Star Wars? They don't exist. Photos of Yoda dolls are not only
> pathetic, but they are not enencumbered copyright-wise either - the
> movie maker retains rights to the characters, and gives out licenses
> to reproduce them in other media. WP does not have such a license.

We dont have to illustrate everything. You can take photos of the
stars at film openings, or prints on the walk of fame, there are
lots of free photos out there.

> Anyway, even if you eliminate "most uses" because they are just
> decoration, you haven't got rid of all of them. And if the use of
> copyrighted material compromises WP's goal of being a free
> encyclopedia, that principle applies to copyrighted textual quotes
> as well. So unless you're prepared to delete fair-use quotes, you
> still haven't got a "free encyclopedia". In fact, the quotes are a
> more serious problem for the freeness goal, because while the images
> are tagged and filterable, the quotes are not easily removable.

99.99% of the images labelled as fair use are not. 99.99% of the
fair use text is. A few errors either way are not important to
the goal of making a free encyclopaedia. The lies and blatent
copyright violation in the images is.

I too can find a handful of fair use images. But I have yet to see
something in say [[Category:Promotional images]] that is actually
a promotional image (and there is really no justification for us
having real promos anyway as we dont accept permission images). Its
a blanket copyvio category. There are thousands of them, and more
added every day.

Justinc