Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Images and Media/Non-free/Archive 4

message: Hello, I am studying to be a lawyer. As a disclaimer, I want to state up front that: 
::*I have not taken the bar, 
::*nor have I taken a intellectual property class yet.  
That said, I have gotten into some arguments with other Wikipedians in regards to fair use. Because of these arguments, I have become familiar with fair use law more as a layperson then as a lawyer, although I have used my skills learned in law school to examine the case law on the subject and the fair use statute.
There are two points I would like to make here: 
*First that fair use/intellectual property law is vague and is difficult to interpret even for copyright lawyers. 
*Second many Wikipedians, out of ignorance and fear of the law, and worse against the spirit, dreams and goals of wikipedia's mission, often delete items which could potentially be considered fair use.
First, fair use/intellectual property law is vague and is difficult to interpret even for copyright lawyers.  The law was intentionally written and intended to be vague:
::"There are no hard-and-fast (fair use) rules, only general rules and varying court decisions. That's because the judges and lawmakers who created the fair use exception did not want to limit the definition of fair use. They wanted it--like free speech--to have an expansive meaning that could be open to interpretation."
If it is difficult for lawmakers and lawyers to understand the rules of fair use, which were intentionally meant to be difficult to quantify/understand, it is insulting and intrusive that certain Wikipedians, with no legal background whatsoever, take it upon themselves to interpret fair use law. 
Worse, in my experience many Wikipedians use copyright law as a POV weapon. These Wikipedians often decide to delete material, "just to be on the safe side" they argue, when they don't even know what either side of the copyright debate is, let alone what the "safe side" is. 
If Wikipedia were to go to court (and this appears highly unlikely) Wikipedia could be potentially seen as similar to a file sharing network, not liable for what its users do.  File sharing companies like Napster and Gnutella have transformed the music industry for the better.  Wikipedia has the potential to do the same for intellectual property, if its users would just allow it too.
Second, as mentioned above, many well intentioned but ignorant Wikipedians take it upon themselves to use heavy handed tactics to delete anything that is potentially a copyright violation.  Many Wikipedians ignore this statement:
::"As a general rule, if you are using a small portion of somebody else's work in a non-competitive way and the purpose for your use is to benefit the public, you're on pretty safe ground. On the other hand, if you take large portions of someone else's expression for your own purely commercial reasons, the rule usually won't apply."
As I have argued before,  web sites such as Common dreams, another non-profit, copy whole articles onto their website with no legal trouble.  No person has ever given me a satisfactory answer why this is acceptable for Common Dreams but it is taboo for Wikipedia. Copy and paste one sentence from an article onto a controversial Wikipedia site, and a Wikipedian who is ignorant of the law, will heavy handedly delete the sentence citing copyright.
As I have mentioned before , the worst part of this destructive copyright policy on wikipedia is how it undermines the stated dreams and goals of Wikipedia. As Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia envisioned: 
::*"Finally, we should never forget as a community that we are the vanguard of a knowledge revolution that will transform the world. We are the leading edge innovators and leaders of what is becoming a global movement to free knowledge from proprietary constraints. 100 years from now, the idea of a proprietary textbook or encyclopedia will sound as quaint and remote as we now think of the use of leeches in medical science."  
::*"Wikipedia goal is to create a free, democratic, reliable encyclopedia—actually, the largest encyclopedia in history, in terms of both breadth and depth. This is an ambitious goal, and will probably take many years to achieve!"--
::*"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." -Jimmy Wales, July 2004
::*"Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language. Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal." -- Wikipedia-l mailing list, March 8, 2005
::*"Fair use (and the narrower fair dealing) is an important freedom from abuse by copyright holders. It is good to see a decision which supports it." 
Wikipedia could be the "vanguard of a knowledge revolution that will transform the world" on the forefront of opening up intellectual property for the entire world to share and benefit from, as Google is doing today.  Instead, because of a handful of misguided zealous Wikipedians, who are afraid of some vague potential legal threat, Wikipedia is so much less. Travb 15:57, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair Use from a legal stand point

message: Looking through my watchlist, I noticed that someone removed the text
"on the English-language Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation" from Template:Promophoto.  That bit there was added to the tag as part of our goal to rewrite our fair use tags, specifically #9 on  WP:WPFU under goals:  A large part of our invocation of "fair use" is because our site is educational in purpose and run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and that our invocation of "fair use" for our use of the image might not apply to other uses (that is, third parties can't "piggyback" on our "fair use" claims).  Having said that, I've never really questioned the utility of that text myself so I'm wondering what others think.  Do you think that that bit of text is useful to have on the fair use templates?  JYolkowski // talk 23:11, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I do, and I think this change should be reveted. DES (talk) 23:19, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I just expressed my opinion.  Jkelly 23:53, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I do think it very important to specify our being non-profit educational to be fair.--Jusjih 07:24, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  On the English-language Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States... 

message: Am I the only one that thinks the new paragraph on the project page isn't what a bunch of people here endorsed when they signed up?  Jkelly 23:54, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Project page change 

message: Please have a look at WP:CVG talk. I'd like to get some feedback from this WikiProject before proceeding. Cheers, Jacoplane 06:57, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fair use videos of copyrighted software? 

message: I just added a proposal at Wikipedia talk:Fair use, aimed to allow sports team logos to be used on userpages, and I'd like to get some comments on it from the people in this project.  Thanks, VegaDark 03:51, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Wikipedia talk:Fair use

message: Myself and another user have just finished categorizing the image copyright tags. Fair use tags can be found in :Category:Non-free image copyright tags, along with a few other non-free tags which haven't yet been completely deprecated. Physchim62 (talk) 09:40, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I left a suggestion on the category's talk page. – Quadell (talk) (bounties) 13:17, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fair use tags