[Wikipedia-l] Fair use in non-English Wikipedias (moved from wikien)

Sun Nov 27 22:14:07 UTC 2005

On 11/27/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

> What about non-free pictures that are legal for Wikipedia to use?
> No-derivatives images, non-commercial only images, by permission
> images.  Are these banned?  Are there many floating around?  I believe
> these are banned from commons, except for some logos owned by
> Wikimedia.

These are banned on *english* Wikipedia and I presume on all others.

We would rather have the smallest amount of fair use content (or
otherwise unfree content) on Wikipedia possible, because it would
maximize our goal to be a *free* encyclopedia. This would be true even
if there was no confusion or international disconnect over fair use.
However,  the English Wikipedia community has decided that in order to
do our job successfully we must make some non-minimal use of fair use
content because a great many historically significant images are only
available that way and a great many other images are much more
available.

We don't extend the same tolerance for 'with permission' or
'non-commercial' because it isn't at all clear that choice of freedom
in that case cuts us out from a great number of images which we could
obtain in no other way.

Perhaps the difference in the decision is in part caused by our
differing competition, is Brockhaus highly illustrated?

In any case, there is already pressure from some on English Wikipedia
to further restrict our use of fair use to only cases where it can
clearly be articulated that no reasonable freely licensed content
could be created to replace the fair use image.  As time goes on and
more photographers join our project, I suspect that such desires will
gain traction and we will see a reduction in fair use there.

> This might be a misunderstanding of what I was saying.  Not including
> non-free images clearly has positives and negatives.  Personally I
> believe the positives outweigh the negatives, at least in the vast
> majority of cases.  In my opinion every article should have at least
> some image in it eventually.  Adding a non-free image fixes that
> problem in the short term, but in the long term it lessens the chance
> that a free image will come along.

You make it sound a lot more cut and dry than it actually is... Fair
use is not a blanket permission to violate copyright as such it is not
really a good quick fix to a missing image. In most interesting
jurisdictions, since parody isn't something we are likely to do, we
must be making critical commentary of the creative work we borrow from
in order to make a strong fair use claim.

For the case of a great many articles, it's simply easier to nag
someone with access to the right place or object to take a picture.

> Of course, if all the rest of the languages still lack the image,
> maybe they'll be the ones to make the free image for us :).  I'm
> joking to some extent.  Besides that being kind of rude there are
> *some* images which are much more likely to be made by someone who
> only speaks English.
>
> Anyway, the English Wikipedia seems to be relying less on fair use
> than it has in the past.  I think it's good for us to look at the
> other languages to see that it really wouldn't be that horrible to
> drop reliance on it completely.

Ah, so you've spotted that trend. It's true and I think it is an
unquestionably good thing.