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

Tue Jan 24 02:49:45 UTC 2006

> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org 
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Fastfission

> I think it is worth pointing out that copyright law (and 
> trademark law) affects text and images (and other forms of 
> media) differently. It is very easy to make a copyright-safe 
> version of a textual account; it is very hard in most cases 
> to make copyright-safe versions of images or visual-based 
> media unless they are themselves based on "basic facts" (i.e. 
> a diagram of some physical principle).
> 
> The only way I know of to make "free" versions of copyrighted 
> things would be as knock-offs. But that not only wouldn't 
> help our purposes at all, but it would itself skate far 
> closer to legal action than a "fair use" claim probably 
> would. But that's just a speculation.

I wonder at what point an image is so downgraded by thumbnailing as to be
exempt from any challenge to fair use. In the absence of primary images we
can use with PD or GFDL tags, then there should be some way that we can use
low-quality images to illustrate an article so that whoever owns the
high-quality copyright image does not feel that their potential market has
been targeted. An external link pointing to the original copyright source
would give readers access to a higher-quality image.

But if quoting some percentage of a published text work for the purpose of
commentary or reference is acceptable, then surely we can find some
percentage of an image quality that would be generally acceptable. Is a 100
by 100 pixel thumbnail of a 1000 by 1000 pixel copyright image acceptable?
That's only 1% of the original!

I ask because there are some articles that would be well served by even a
low-quality image, but it is all but impossible to find an image that we can
use. An example would be in the case of an air disaster, where photographs
would almost certainly be the property of news agencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tenerife_Disaster_Collision_aftermath_27_
March_1977.png is one example, where the image is scanned in at low
resolution.

Peter (Skyring)