Re: Regarding fair use

>From: Iamunknown <[email protected]>
>In particular, we should allow very very limited use of non-free
>media when it would be practically impossible to use free media -- the 
>media
>used in the European History wikibook comes to mind -- and for small 
>textual
>quotations. What are everyone else's feelings?

it would have to be very very limited, and in that case it would likely be a 
few exceptions to the rule as opposed to a rule in and of itself. And 
regardless of what we choose to do with fair use media, if the WMF mandates 
a position one way or the other, we have to go with that. I doubt highly 
that the WMF is going to say "all fair use images must be deleted now", it 
is more likely that they will be phased out over a period of time.

Even the fact that fair use images might be hard to replicate doesn't change 
the fact that the use of these images is still illegal in most countries. 
Books like the European history book are illegal to print and distribute in 
much of europe, for instance. I can think of maybe a dozen instances where 
fair use images might be indispensible, and in those cases we would have to 
create workarounds so the books could be printed without them anyway.

I think the best course of action for us is to disallow new fair use images 
from being uploaded, and evaluate the old fair use images, on a case-by-case 
basis. Most can likely be deleted (as mistagged and a copyright violation) 
many more will likely be duplicatable, and the remainder we can deal with 
later.

--Andrew Whitworth

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