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Photographs of ancient coins

ResolvedAdvice from lawyer, see below

Are images like Image:Agathokleia.jpg derivative works of the original coins (and thus public domain) or creative works eligible for their own copyright? There are many such images, and I need to know how to proceed in dealing with them. I was under the impression the photos were public domain, but I will mark them as replaceable fair use if they are not. — Carl (CBM · talk) 01:37, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

The question boils down to: is photographing an ancient coin a creative act, as photographing a sculpture (because you have to choose a point of view, depth of field, lighting etc.), or is it just slavish, technical, reproduction, as is using a photocopier or scanner?

Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. says that slavish, technical reproductions of paintings by photography are not creative, and thus do not creative new copyright. However, it is not clear to me whether this would apply to photographs of sculpted or embossed coins. For once, in order to photograph a coin, one has to choose directions of lighting, and one gets different renderings depending on how the coin is lighted.

Are there court cases regarding coin photographs? David.Monniaux 01:42, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I sent an email to our lawyer, Mike Godwin.

This question requires some legal advice. Are images of ancient coins such as

[1]

copyrightable by the person taking the photograph? If not, are they public domain? There are many such images (almost identical except different coins) on wiki.riteme.site, and their disposition is unclear.

His response was "The short answer is: yes, they are copyrightable by the person taking the photographs." I will take care of tagging them correctly. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:16, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

My understanding (IANAL) is that the easy way to distinguish is 2D vs. 3D. Anything 3D has creativity involved. I think you're misusing the word derivative. I think that a derivative work is one that has an extra copyright. In this case, there is a copyright on the coin design (expired in this case), and a copyright on the photo. In the case of a 2D object, the scan/photo is not considered a derivative, so there is only the original copyright (not necessarily PD, although maybe you were just saying that because the coin is so old). May I suggest that rather than assume these are fair use, you ask the uploader if he took the pictures, or downloaded them from somewhere. If he took them, maybe he'll release them under GFDL or CC. If downloaded, maybe he can ask for them to be released. Ingrid 13:55, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I read through Derivative work just now to refresh myself about the definition. I have notified the uploader of the images, because if they are nonfree then there are replaceable by free images. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:12, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Did you specifically raise the possible relevance of Bridgeman vs Corel in your email to Mike Godwin? Jheald 14:31, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

The blockquote above is what I mailed him. I'm confident his opinion is soundly based; Mike Godwin is an expert in this area. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:37, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

The Bridgeman decision said that "Elements of originality [that would qualify a photograph for copyright protection] may include posing the subjects, lighting, angle, selection of film and camera, evoking the desired expression, and almost any other variant involved." Photos like Image:55doubledie.jpg or Image:Denár Vratislav II-B.jpg are certainly subject to copyright. The court also ruled that "'slavish copying,' although doubtless requiring technical skill and effort, does not qualify." There's a lot of gray area, from this photo of a painting with thick globs of paint, to photos of carving like this one with minimal 3-D content, to photos like this one of a carving or this one of a coin which seem to have the intent of faithfully reproducing the content without adding additional "creative content", but could be ruled as having (incidental) creative content. It's not black-and-white, and there's not much case law on the subject. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 14:53, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

It's not black and white, but in general I'd rather trust the WMF counsel than our gut-feeling consensus on issues of copyright. I hope that CBM's wise move will be emulated by future editors seeking factual questions of copyright (avoid "how many screenshots can I use on this TV show article"), since that will clear up a lot of gray areas for us. (ESkog)^(Talk) 15:20, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Fair use of promotional material and screen shots need to be protected

I've mostly dropped off the Wikipedia map, but in the recent months a few of the images that I've uploaded have been slapped with tags indicating that they would be deleted if rationales were not forthcoming. In one case, the image already had a rationale (and the editor who added the tag withdrew it, subsequently). In another case, the situation was more complex, and had a far more detailed explanation of its standing, but was deleted anyway.

Now, I'm a fairly long-standing contributor who isn't known for slapping images all over the site. I upload what's truly free content, or images that I honestly understand to meet the criteria, which I've read many times. I'm very concerned, therefore about what the average contributor is to do.

Wikipedia needs to have an all-in-one tag (actually, one or each of several image types) that asserts the most common usage on Wikipedia, and how it is and is not considered fair use to apply such works. That is, instead of having a tag that says, "this is a promotional photo, insert your own fair use rationale," having a tag that says, "this is a promotional photo that is used in accordance with fair use, in the following contexts:..." The default case should not be that every editor's flawed understanding of fair use is written down, and later challenged, but instead that what we know to be the most common and acceptable case is protected (e.g. promo photos and screenshots used sparingly at low-resolution to illustrate their entire context, not just their subject matter). The onslaught of tagging and removal of both correctly and incorrectly used images is starting to hurt Wikipedia. Even images that are dangerously unique (such as photos of posters of historical significance in which the originals are no longer extant) get indiscriminately tagged.

Sure, there should always be a "fill in your own fair use rationale" equivalent for exceptions, but the most common cases, if left to the creativity of the uploader, will inevitably be challenged and removed needlessly at some point in the future. -Harmil 17:05, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

It looks to me like you've been ignored. Badagnani 18:25, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Category:Publicity photographs

I saw Quadell mentioned this category above and have gone through all the images starting with the randomly picked letter G. I have tagged over 700 images the last days. I have concentrated on the most obvious violations so there are definitively more. A large amount of them are clear NFCC #1 violations. I am going to continue with images starting with H, but I really need help and hope someone is willing. Rettetast 18:22, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! That's great! – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 21:52, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

It's "non-free media rationale" now? - we need a better term

Yesterday an editor proposed, and is now boldly implementing, a change of "fair use rationale" to "non-free media rationale." Hence, we no longer have "fair use rationale guideline." We now have a "non-free media rationale guideline."

I think that's a bad choice because it makes a confusing issue even more confusing. Here are my reasons:

• Bureaucrateze. The term is a verbose piece of bureaucracy-speak. Unlike the old term, nobody can type or discuss this one without an acronym ("NFMR?") or a nickname ("rationale" for short?). We use words like "policy," "guideline," "consensus," "editor", and "administrator" in specialized ways. If we're going to change all of our common words so people truly understand that we do things differently here, how about "Wikipedia consensus-building process", "volunteer moderating-editor assitant" and so on?
• Agenda-pushing through language. The purpose of the change is to remind people that our standards are higher than the legal ones for fair use. That is certainly true, but why force people to acknowledge your point by adding an extra three syllables, five characters, and a hyphen, every time they use the term?
• The older term was fine. Fair use rationales are indeed rationales of why an image is fair use. All of the components go to fair use, and the underlying issue is fair use. We simply have a higher standard than the legal one because we are trying to be extra careful and applicable for all uses in all jurisdictions.
• New term is confusing. The old term is in widespread use here, and is referenced on many different policy and talk pages, as well as in many tens of thousands of image pages. Changing the term now causes a rift. Even if you could avoid misstatements and broken links by replacing the term consistently and project-wide wherever it appears, it confuses people to turn a common name into a technical one.
• Does not mean what it says it means. One reason it is so confusing is that it is not clear English. The word "rationale" modifies "media" to suggest that we are trying to justify the media. We are actually trying to justify use of the media in an article. The old term is more accurate here because rationale modifies the word "use."

For all these reasons we should leave it the way it is. If we must change the term to highlight that we have "fair use plus" instead of "fair use" on Wikipedia, we need something that is short, to the point, pronounceable, and easy for people to understand -- particularly the people we are trying the hardest to reach, new users who upload bad images. Something like "image use rationale". Wikidemo 19:37, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

I just think it's a logical extention of the rename of this policy. We have a non-free content policy and you need to write a non-free content rationale... Ok, it's a bit verbose, but I think it's importnat to emphasis that we are not asking for a rationale for fair use in the legal sense, we are asking for a rationale explaining how something meet our non-free content policy... --Sherool (talk) 19:42, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

The verbosity is my main problem. Can we have a contest or something to see if someone can keep it down to four or five syllables before we turn Wikipedia into an acronym fountain? Wikidemo 19:46, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Sure, if anyoe can think of a better name without introducing yet another new term (at least it's fairly consistent now (aside from all the lingering references naturaly) "Non-free justification", "Unfree use rationale" um... Anyway the name is not set in stone or anything, I just saw the previous debate to rename had died off, and descided to just go and do it seeing as most people seem to at least accept the "non-free" naming scheme. --Sherool (talk) 19:52, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

I think this is a good move, since what we're asking for really is only tangentially related to the well-defined concept of "fair use." I do share Wikidemo's concern that it's a little unwieldy, but I'm having trouble coming up with a better way to say what we mean. (ESkog)^(Talk) 20:10, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Still thinking. The full term, properly, would be "non-free media use rationale," even more of a mouthful but more precise. How about that, and "use rationale" as a short form for people to use conversationally? Wikidemo 20:19, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

That could work. I like it. (ESkog)^(Talk) 20:30, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

How about simply "non-free use rationale", or "rationale" for short? The word "media" is more in there as a filler word, we all know that the policy doesn't apply to text. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 21:17, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Media is also nasty because it's plural, but usually with a rationale we're referring to a single object. Jheald 21:21, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

It's plural is Latin, but it can be either singular or plural in English. Like data. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 21:36, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

The quote is, "The medium is the message," and I assure you that McLuhan was speaking English. That imprecise usage has become common is no excuse. Not that I insist on prescriptive usage, but any usage such as this one that reduces expressiveness is to be resisted. There's also a deliberate program in the media (ha!), enforced by manuals of style, to de-Latinize certain plurals, and this is as prescriptive as it comes. Thus we get "millenniums" instead if "millennia", which is not only borderline illiterate but just plain ugly. TCC (talk) (contribs) 02:15, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Media (singular) has a particular meaning, namely the channels of communication - tv, radio, press etc. And even in that meaning its use in the singular is not uncontroversial. Jheald 22:04, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

I like "use rationale". We can tell new users that to use a non-free image, you need to supply a use rationale. Free images can be used without a use rationale. It's brief and intuitive. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 21:36, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

This is very nice and simple. "Non-free use rationale" commonly referred to as a "use rationale" :) - cohesion 01:01, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I'm implementing it. "Non-free use rationale," and "use rationale" for short. My internet connect is a little bumpy at the moment so it will take a few minutes for me to hit all the redirect pages. I'll also try to find places where it's used, and the template. Wikidemo 15:54, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Done, in the most obvious locations. I created a new template that's a redirect, template:non-free use rationale, instead of moving the original template. If anyone sees any uses of the old term "fair use rationale" or variants let's conform them to "non-free use rationale" or "use rationale" for short. They're called a lot of different things in different places, which could add to people's confusion. Wikidemo 16:57, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Fair use license tag

Whilst we're at it, the term "fair use license tag", as used inter alia on the page formerly known as WP:FURG, should die. Whatever these tags might be, they certainly aren't any kind of licenses for fair use.

Suggest "non-free media copyright tag" or "copyright tag" for short? (They're currently listed at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags/Non-free and categorised under Category:Non-free image copyright tags). Jheald 20:43, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

The generic term should be "copyright tag." To get specific it should be "copyright tag for non-free media" or the inverse. If we're removing the "fair use" language we should avoid it here to in order to avoid confusion. We should also clear up a major source of confusion that copyright tags are for uploading, and use rationale tags are for using non-free media in articles. The need for both, and the one-to-many relationship, are a big source of confusion to people. We're not changing that system but the wording could be more helpful. Wikidemo 21:34, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

The purpose of the tags is for categorisation, and to facilitate the identification of non-free content in a machine-readable format (ie, to allow non-free content to be stripped out of database dumps). See point 2 of the licensing policy resolution. If someone can come up with a name for the tags which reflects this, that would be great. --bainer (talk) 02:21, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Comments:

• I agree entirely with Wikidemo's argument above (except that pushing agendas through language can be good or evil, depending on the agenda: heck, this whole policy should be pushing its agenda through language).
• I have a problem with the substitution of "content" with "media", because the latter excludes words. A similar issue has been under discussion under Criterion 8 above.
• Talking of pushing our agenda, "justification" is stronger than "rationale", because it emphasises the need to actively justify the use of NFC, rather than appealing to mere logic. (The policy is not entirely driven by logic, is it?) Tony 02:09, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Updated stats

I just ran an update on image status.

• Phase 1: 3670

images with zero rationale

• Phase 2: 134616

Images with no mention of any page that they are used on

• Phase 3: 18918

Images that mention at least one but not all pages where they are used

• Total  : 157204

total images with Rationale issues

^∆ 00:09, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

"Significance" too vague criterion

IMO this is a useless criterion. One may argue than 95% of photos of celebrities are not fair use: seeing their mugshots hardly significantly improves the understanding of their bios, unless the text discusses peculiarities of ther appearance that cannot be explained in words. E.g. for pornstars writing "she has real big boobs" would be enough. `'Míkka 19:07, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Almost any non-free photo of a living celebrity is deleteable anyway, per WP:NFCC#1. Videmus Omnia ^Talk 19:27, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

If significance was the only criterium, yes. But there are nine other criteria. Garion96 (talk) 19:38, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Also, keep in mind the role of the policy in relation to the guidelines. The policy (WP:NFCC) is the overarching principle that applies to all non-free media. The guideline (WP:NONFREE) drills down to various applications via a series of examples and categories, e.g. logos, pictures of living people, etc. If you take that document as a whole it gives you a pretty good idea of what's allowed. And yes, 95% of copyrighted photos of living celebrities would not qualify for non-free use here, a combination of the relatively low significance of showing what they look like and the fact that for most there is either a fair use picture out there or it would be easy to make one. If the entire point you are trying to make about a porn star is "she has big boobs" you can do that in words.Wikidemo 20:16, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Big words, presumably. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 21:06, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

"The female person whom this article discusses is in possession of massively-proportioned mammaries". - Videmus Omnia ^Talk 21:32, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Jokes aside, for porn stars we have a measurements and a natural bust tags in the infobox. We also have a List of big-bust models and performers and for example Yulia Nova says (unsourced) "Among fans, Nova is known for her unusually large, natural "G"-cup breasts juxtaposed with her slim figure.". Nil Einne 08:42, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Question about non-free image of living person

If there's a copyrighted image of a living person uploaded on English Wikipedia and there's no free alternative uploaded is it fine to link to the image to the person's biography article? - Throw 17:29, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Apparently not. An admin's been repeatedly removing a fair-use image of Luna Lovegood placed on the Evanna Lynch page to show the actress who played the role. This policy makes absolutely no sense to me. -FeralDruid 20:01, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

I see the survey mentioned above addresses this, under Potential for replacement. -FeralDruid 20:06, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Did you read the policy? It answers your question. The answer is no... Nil Einne 08:34, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

I needed clarity. That's what the word "talk" in "talk page" is about, no? Obviously if I found my way here I would have read the policy. - Throw 09:08, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Because there is the potential that a free image could be procured a copyrighted image is not allowed. The image on the page of Luna Lovegood portrays the image of the CHARACTER luna lovegood in the Harry Potter films. The same image does not portray the actress and as such cannot be used on the page of the actress herself. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:39, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Non-free content is considered replaceable if either a free alternative exists, or a free alternative could be created. For the vast majority of living persons whom we would write articles about, it's going to be possible to create a free alternative, even if there is not currently one in existence. This is particularly true for film actors, who regularly attend premieres and other events where it's possible for members of the public to get a photograph.

If there is no free image available then you can use a placeholder which encourages people to upload a free image, see Wikipedia:Fromowner documentation. --bainer (talk) 15:39, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Image fair use: "illustrate the subject in question"

Regarding the use of a non-free image of a person (dead, so the creation of a free replacement is not possible) under a fair use rationale that includes "to illustrate the subject in question": Is that illustrative fair use considered only valid if the person is the subject of the article in which in the image appears? Or, if the person is discussed prominently in some other article, where it would be genuinely improve the article to add a photo of that person in that section of the article, then can that other article also use the same image under the same fair use rationale? The person would not be the "subject in question" with regard to the entire article, but could be argued to be the "subject in question" with regard to that particular portion or section of the article. Does that fly at all? Mwelch 18:09, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Restarting non-poll discussion

So does anyone object to the text that jheald suggested in the aborted poll above? If you're not happy with it, why not, and what changes could be made that would accommodate your concerns? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 20:18, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Proposed change to two WP:NONFREE guideline examples

The current proposal, one of several changes under consideration, is to replace

• Cover art: Cover art from various items, for identification only in the context of critical commentary of that item (not for identification without critical commentary).
• Team and corporate logos: For identification. See Wikipedia:Logos.

with

• Cover art: Cover art for items, when used to identify the items in question in articles or major article sections about the items (i.e. the article or section must contain significant commentary in prose form about the item identified by the image).
• Logos: Logos, when used to identify products, brands, or companies in articles or major article sections about the same (i.e. the article or section must contain significant critical commentary in prose form about the product, brand, or company identified by the logo).

Discussion

• This is useful, as cited above, because it specifies what kind of critical commentary is needed, ending the question of whether the commentary must be specific to the image itself, as opposed to the work it represents. I still don't care whether we use "critical" or "significant" - as I have said above, I will continue to interpret either in the same way, as it seems to be the sense of everyone on this page that they mean the same thing and this is solely a cosmetic change. (ESkog)^(Talk) 20:34, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the proposed changes, if people really want to make it clear that significant commentary is necessary (if not already implied by "articles or major article sections about the item"). As an aside to the aborted poll above, I'd like to note that magazine covers can be treated the same as book covers, i.e. they only represent the magazine itself, and cannot normally be used to represent anything pictured on the cover. Exceptions to the rule must be justified by significant commentary on that particular cover by multiple reliable sources, and usually this only happens if a magazine cover becomes famous, or infamous as the case may be. -- wacko2 20:43, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, this is the kind of change that I believe we still need in the wording (See my prototype suggestion bellow). --Abu badali ^(talk) 20:51, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. However, misuse of magazine covers is a persistent problem that may continue whatever we say in the generic case of cover art. We may have to modify example 7 to be more emphatic in telling people that in general use of magazine covers is not permitted to illustrate the subject of the cover photo.Wikidemo 20:57, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Actually, we are targeting an yet more evolved abuse of magazine cover images: To "circumvent" example #7, some editors add some paragraphs about a non-notable magazine issue to articles, so that they can use that pretty photo of their favorite artist/athlete. We want to make it clear that we should never discuss magazine issues that had not been significantly discussed by multiple reliable sources. --Abu badali ^(talk) 21:34, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

WP:NONFREE and WP:NFCC are not supposed to tell editors what prose to include or not include in articles. WP:UNDUE works fine for that purpose. 17Drew 21:41, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

(ec) But where is the line? The article Willy Brandt has a four line quotation from Time as to why it named him Man of the Year in 1970 -- which is accompanied by a picture of the corresponding cover. That seems appropriate to me, the quotation is an excellent summation of his key position in the world at the time, and the cover is intimately related to that story. Similarly if Newsweek had run a cover on global cooling in 1975 (which as far as I know it didn't), I think it would be fully appropriate in the article to bring home in the most direct way the then mainstreamness of the theory. If we look at the poster example of the image as the story, the famous cover image of Demi Moore, it is actually only discussed in 3 lines of text in her article.

I agree that the criteria must be qualitative instead of quantitative. And that would rule out the current use of Willy Brandt cover. The paragraph "discussing" the cover is just a quotation from the magazine (i.e., fair use of text). To be used there, we should point out to reliable sources that have discussed Willy Brandt's appearance as the Man of The year. If no other publication about Willy Brandt found it relevant to mention that he was the Man of the Year, then we (as an encyclopedia) should not be the first to do so. (The fact that the Time's writers elaborated an "excellent summation of his key position..." is not an excuse for us copying their content verbatim).

Likewise, we should only mention the hypothetical Newsweek coverage on Global cooling if that coverage was notable itself. To point out the "mainstreamness" of the theory, we don't need non-free images. We just need a sentence saying "This theory had abundant mainstream coverage at the time" followed by numerous references, including the hypothetical Newsweek story.

Also, the Demi Moore example can only be accepted if a good number sources are added to the claims of "...enormous attendant publicity..." and that "...the image was endlessly parodied..." --Abu badali ^(talk) 22:44, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

So I think the requirement of being central to a section is appropriate when the image is being used solely for identification. But when the image itself is the story, I think qualitative rather than quantitative standards need to apply. We need to tread carefully: we shouldn't be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Jheald 21:57, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

This example only covers uses for identification. Other uses are discussed elsewhere. I think we'll have to address insignificant mentions directly rather than by restating Wikipedia's sourcing requirements. Most articles lack adequate sources and we can't clean that up through the image policy; conversely, as much coverage as there is of the media someone trying to game the system could find independent sources talking about magazine covers even where it's not a worthwhile issue to discuss. Isn't there already a standard for what is worth talking about in an article? We could say "major article section worthy of inclusion in the article" or "prose commentary worthy of a major article section" but we're getting wordier and wordier. We could also tighten up example 7 for magazines to be clear on that point. Keep in mind that if someone games the rules we can always call foul. The examples say "normally," not "if you stretch your use to fit." Wikidemo 22:44, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Since WP:NONFREE is a guideline, i.e., something to explain the police (rather than the policy itself), why not extrapolate the scope a little bit and add some brief note explaining that the "item" being commented must be notable? What about start with "Cover art for notable items, when used to identify the items...". Or maybe at the end: "article or section must contain significant, properly sourced, commentary in prose...". --Abu badali ^(talk) 20:45, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Is the notability standard any different for major article sections than for articles? Probably not. I see no harm, and some benefit, to User:Abu badali's suggestion. I would keep it simple and insert "notable" once in each of the two halves, "notable items..." and "notable products, brands, or companies..." That would prevent people from writing a large amount of prose about something unimportant just to justify a picture. Wikidemo 20:53, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

I think the "properly sourced" bit is important, though. It kind of reaffirms the importance of WP:NOR. howcheng {chat} 21:47, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

The text could be copyediting significantly. And I would suggest that, before we agree to commit any changes, that we copyedit the entire "Examples of acceptable use" section. How about:

• Cover art is used in articles or major article sections alongside significant prose commentary to identify the item.
• Logos are used in articles or major article sections alongside significant prose commentary to identify the associated organisation.

That is, if we want to "Examples of acceptable use" section to be in the imperative mood, as the policy section is. I again firmly suggest that we work on copyediting the entire section. --Iamunknown 21:02, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

"The text could be copyediting significantly." Was that intentional? Either way, I was amused. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 21:11, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

The edit changes the meaning significantly and makes things unclear. I haven't found a way to shorten the proposed text without that result. Wikidemo 21:18, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, don't know. If you just look at the proposed changes and not the criteria you could say that discographies are ok if you talk about the album for at least a paragraph. That logo's of sports teams are ok in the Super Bowl XXXVIII article etc. Garion96 (talk) 21:08, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Lists are explicitly banned elsewhere, and one of the reverted proposals that is not discussed here but will be soon is an example explicitly banning discographies. But the present example does not enable them either, and is harsher on them than the existing language. If you were to add a paragraph or more of prose and make a major article section each of multiple albums, the article is not a discography. Even if you went through the motions and made twelve different headers for twelve different albums you would be hard pressed to say that each is a major section of the article. What you have is probably a mess that needs to be divided into multiple articles, one for each album. That's a style guideline from elsewhere. This one example can't tell people how to write good articles; it just says how they can use images if they do. Wikidemo 21:18, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

If this proposal turns the current discography articles into lists of well sourced paragraphs commenting about each album, then we're surely in the right direction. --Abu badali ^(talk) 21:47, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

As long as the end result is that e.g. the usage of this image [2] in this article is deemed acceptable, the wording above sounds agreeable. Tarc 21:24, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Why is identification important enough to justify the use of non-free images? Does anyone have an argument besides "it helps you know you have arrived at the right place", "you might not remember the title, but you might remember the cover", "it helps you find what you are looking for faster", or "it looks nice"? None of these are particularly good reasons to include non-free images. We do not need book and magazine covers in every section about a half page article on page 80 in the magazine; or screenshots everytime someone is interviewed on television or the cover of a magazine (normally there to show you what the subject looks like, what else is there to show that is important?); or the album cover everytime someone writes a paragraph about an album; or a sports team logo in an article about every game they played in or sections of a player's article where their career with that team is discussed. The guideline must explain what is actual policy, that non-free images are only used in limited circumstances when they are actually needed. Kotepho 00:23, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

That identification of the subject matter a legitimate use of non-free cover art and logos is a widely accepted policy point. I don't think that's up for debate right now. Part of the reason to implement this guideline is to quiet objections overs something this fundamental, where people occasionally read the significance requirement and come to a different conclusion for themselves. Identification is certainly important. The user knows they have reached the right place, and it makes the articles more useful, accurate, and reliable. In the case of logos it inherently tells a person what the company's brand, image, and approach is (that is the argument behind trademarks). In the case of cover art, it tells people what is inside. That is the purpose of cover art. Using these non-free images for identification is using them for their intended purpose. If identification were not so important, I doubt companies would be spending tens to hundreds of billions of dollars a year globally on branding and trade dress.

Most examples you list are not identification uses so they are not part of the discussion about these two examples. A magazine cover used to show that there was a half page article, or any article, in the magazine is identifying the article, not the magazine. If someone wanted to game the rules, then it would be caught under the requirement that it has to be part of an article or major section about the magazine or the issue itself, not the fact that someone appeared in it. Screen shots of an interview are not cover art or logos so they are not treated by these examples. Album covers are permitted for identification of the album in articles or major sections about the album, and that is absolutely a legitimate use for the reasons indicated. People do associate the album art with the album, and using it in this way is a significant help for the article. You may disagree, but there is widespread acceptance, e.g. the oft quoted comments by Jimbo Wales. Logos have even wider acceptance and are mentioned specifically as allowable uses by the Wikimedia licensing resolution we are trying to follow. I don't think there would be any consensus for categorically banning logos or album covers, or requiring case-by-case justifications of why they are significant beyond identification use. Back to your examples, however, a logo is not permitted in a list of games or a list of teams played on because that would be a list, an impermissible use. Further, a sports logo is not permissible for identification in connection with a game at all because the logo identifies a team, not a game. A sports logo would only be permissible on a player's article if it identified the team in a section with significant commentary about the team, not the player, which is unlikely. Wikidemo 02:37, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Identification in an article about something makes sense; identifying whenever it happens to be mentioned does not. Saying that identification alone is justifiable anywhere is starkly against our actual policies of limited use. The argument for identification itself is flimsy and completely falls apart when you are talking about sections in other articles. How are you sure you "arrived at the right place" in such an instance? Everytime we have a section that is about a company we should include the logo so the reader is sure we are talking about the correct company? Is this different for sports team logos, movie posters, book covers, film covers, or album covers? No.

All of those examples are things that would be covered by the proposed wording and are things that I have actually seen in articles (or something like it). If you have a paragraph about an article in a magazine, the cover of that issue could be said to identify it. "...using it in this way is significant help for the article." there is no good argument presented for this. Knowing you are in the correct place is weak and does not apply to sections in other article at all. Usefulness in the sense of helping people search the text for something is not important. The use of images in this manner does nothing to improve the accuracy or the reliability of a section unless the section is actually about the image instead of just identifying something. The cover of an item does not normally convey any actual information about the content of the item (there is even an adage about it, "Don't judge a book by its cover" or somesuch). Arguing that people spend money on it, so it must be important does not make sense. "but there is widespread acceptance, e.g. the oft quoted comments by Jimbo Wales." Your claim that this has widespread support is unfounded and you are misrepresenting the quote, which is that an album cover is a suitable illustration of an article about an album, not a section about an album. I am not arguing for the banning the use of logos (although that argument could be made and I might welcome it, but that is not the point under discussion). There is consensus that there must be an argument for each use and identification alone in not enough, even if that were not the case it is not up to us to decide. I never mentioned lists in any of my examples. I do not find it would be unlikely in either case for there to be commentary on the team. An article about a Superbowl could easily have a section talking about a team's performance before and after they participated and how it was a major turning point in the team's history. A quarterback's article could easily talk about how they lead their team and changed it, however the specific details are not actually important. The wording arguably allows such things or could allow it, even when we patently do not. In the cases I outlined the purpose of the use was identification in a section arguably about the object of the image. Kotepho 06:48, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

The proposed wording is far too weak and obfuscates what is actually necessary for the use to constitute fair use. It takes away "critical commentary" and replaces it with "about" (and "commentary", but only in brackets). It also leaves the door open for people to think that using material for identification alone is acceptable. I fail to see how moving further away from forms of words similar to those actually used in the legislation and by the courts is an improvement. --bainer (talk) 03:06, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree with brainer. A long time ago (for the internet, that is) I believed that identification alone was ok for TV screen shots, and was very mistaken, which I later realized. I wasted a lot of time and effort, and I don't like the idea that others might be doing the same. We have a need to make this point clearer, to help avoid situations like that. -- Ned Scott 03:32, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Please forgive me if I sound a little dense, but I'm not sure what you mean by "identification alone." Are you saying the policy is fine but the wording isn't, or are you arguing that there needs to be appropriate commentary (setting matter of word choice aside for the moment) about the image itself and not merely the thing the image stands for? In the former case we could collapse the statement to the following.

• Cover art: Cover art for items, when used to identify the items in question in articles or major article sections about the items (i.e. the article or section must contain significantin the context of critical commentary in prose form about the items identified by the image.

I could support that, but if you're arguing that "critical" has a meaning beyond "significant" we need to define that term because it sure isn't obvious to people. Or are you saying that the image has to do more than identify the item? If so, what? I have a feeling that's not what most people are thinking and it might be hard to get consensus for that kind of policy change. Wikidemo 05:16, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

I for one don't consider merely identifying a cover a valid use. Some bands have more then one cover, and I challenge anyone to identify 3 out of 10 random albums from the covers (with no text on the covers, just by the images). —— Eagle101^{Need help?} 19:57, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

• It's highly unlikely that we'll come to agreement that mere identification is enough to warrant inclusion of fair use images. There's vociferous camps on both sides of the issue, and no middle ground that can readily be achieved. The closest we've come to a compromise is that fair use images are ok for identification if use only on articles specifically about those things. But, even that is controversial. Forgive me for being pessimistic, but we've argued endlessly about this without making headway.
• What does happen as a result of poor interpretations of this policy is that identification means liberal use is allowed. That's an all too common mistaken impression, and is one that sucks up a huge amount of time trying to explain the issue to a dizzying array of editors who do not understand. And on and on it goes. --Durin 12:43, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Discussion over?

Have we stalled here? If so does that mean no consensus for a change or is there a consensus to change as proposed? The only opposition I can see comes from people who don't believe that identification use alone for logos and cover art is appropriate. However, under both the status quo and the proposed guideline changes identification is a sufficient reason for use so I don't see how their position to the contrary is reasonable grounds for opposing the changes. Anyone? Should we leave as is, make the changes, or fold this discussion into this broader one about revamping the WP:NONFREE examples section? Thoughts? Wikidemo 16:34, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Don't jump the gun. This is a talk page, and sometimes people take a while to comment. Don't consider the topic closed just because of a few days of inactivity. -- Ned Scott 06:06, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

It's been twenty-seven days of discussion now, the last nine under edit protection. Wikidemo 15:40, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Thirty days, now. Are we going to do anything or are we still in a log jam over the policy? Wikidemo 19:07, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Transcluded rationales

Is there consensus that we shouldn't have completely transcluded rationales? For example {{User:Cohesion/xyz}} on image description pages. It seems like there would be since this would obviously cause a huge mess. If so, can we add that in to #10? Maybe something like "The rationale is presented in clear, plain language, is not entirely transcluded, and is relevant to each use." I don't really mind the ones for formatting, because you can still read the rationale in raw and in a database dump, but they can get out of hand quickly. This is why I'm asking... - cohesion 02:32, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Disagree, and I don't think you could ever get a consensus around that. First of all, the rationale is not "entirely transcluded" as you claim. It is entirely within a template, which is different. There are about 20,000 other image rationales entirely within a template. If the rationale conforms to the policy requirements, it conforms to policy. That the bot keeps tagging some of them is a limitation of the bot. There are 300,000+ fair use images in Wikipedia. Forcing people to jump through hoops every time they upload an image is a poor solution. Better to deal with the bot. If you truly wanted to help downstream users, "clear language" is not the way. That's not machine-readable as the Wikimedia Foundation urges. The way to automate this is tagging images with reliable, consistent data fields and some kind of rights management system like the rest of the world uses in dealing with the question. Wikidemo 03:08, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Just to point it out, not all rationales use a template. The machine-readable part is already done via the licensing tags and categories. Sorry you feel like it's hoops, but it's one way we get editors to evaluate the actual need for these images. -- Ned Scott 03:19, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't understand the distinction you are making between "entirely transcluded" text and things "entirely in a template". That is the same thing. The problem is there is no relationship between the raw text and the rationale. The kind of thing I would not consider entirely transcluded would be parameterized templates, for example where the rationale is present in the wikitext as a parameter {{rationale|text=because the image...}}. This isn't a limitation of the bot, it's a limitation of the database structure of mediawiki. You reference machine readability, userspace templates with no relationship to their text are the extreme of not machine readable. I'm certainly not opposed to completely revamping mediawiki to handle images better, but that's not on the near horizon, for now I think we should focus on how it works now. Also as Ned says, the downstream users' machine readability requirements are addressed with the tags. I don't believe anyone thinks the rationales themselves should or could be machine readable. - cohesion 13:17, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

To make this discussion more concrete, let's consider a rationale where a transcluded template is actually in use - eg like that for Image:JeffBeckWired.jpg. Where you have an image being used in an absolutely standard way like this, isn't it better to have a quality-controlled centrally written rationale for that type of use?

Some of the homebrew hand-made rationales out there are so badly written, and sometimes so off the mark in terms of their knowledge of copyright law, they could actually bring Wikipedia into disrepute, if paraded on WP critic sites, and be construed as incitements to copyright abuse. In legal areas as sensitive as this, it's much better to centralise and control the text we're using, especially for such standard and so widespread uses.

It is also valuable to be able directly to separate the different types of usages in a machine readable way -- eg the very standard use of a cover on an album article infobox, from the more sensitive case of an album cover on the recording artist's page. This the template makes it easy to do.

The template satisfies what policy asks for - a solid, clearly written rationale. It is significantly helpful towards the aim that an appropriate image, used appropriately, gets an appropriate use rationale. Jheald 13:44, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Since each image has at least the potential for a unique rationale, or different circumstances surrounding its use, why aren't these being subst-ed in the first place? (ESkog)^(Talk) 15:50, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Subst'ing the text removes the advantage of uniformity and central quality control. Currently the template can be updated in one place, and those changes are automatically reflected in all the pages using it. Subst'ing would lead to a plethora of different texts becoming spread across WP following changes and evolutions in the template; with no easy way to revise the earlier usages. Subst'ing would also make it impossible to see that each page is actually using a standard centralised text. And it would make it impossible to reverse look up which pages are using the text. For all of these reasons, the template is much more useful unsubst'd. Jheald 16:38, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Cohesion, you make exactly the distinction I was trying to make, thanks. Some templates have parameters that help people format or refine their use rationales, which means there is content from the page where used in addition to the transcluded content. Templates often have conditional language so the output is more than simply the sum of the two.Both User:ESkog and User:Jheald make good points. On the one hand, language that transcludes a template needs that template in order to be read. I don't think that is a huge problem because nearly all Wikipedia content is a meaningless jumble without the templates it transcludes. Anyone using articles one at a time has to look at the output of the article anyway, and anyone doing it en masse is already doing a significant software operation. However, some standardization of fair use templates would be useful so that it is easy to sort through the rationales in an automated fashion. That gets to Jheald's point and mine, that a free form text rationalization is useless to a machine because machines can't process legalistic arguments, and the legalistic arguments are usually faulty anyway. Better to condense as much of this as possible to any parameters that can be made regular. The most popular template, the one with close to 20,000 uses, already does this, for example in the "low resolution" field where people are encouraged to simply type "yes" rather than give the full statement that the policy specifies. Setting this parameter to "yes" is taken as a statement that the resolution is no more than 300 X 300, sufficiently large to accomplish the intended use without being usable for piracy or competing with the original, etc....This template does not even flesh it out, it leaves things as a raw parameter. Wikidemo 19:45, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

What is with this 300 by 300 pixel limit? The image has to big enough to see the significant features. A movie poster may require more pixels than a postage stamp. On this project page the Billy Ripken baseball card is given as an example of appropriate fair use. The card is 384 × 534 pixels and if it were smaller you could not read comment on the end of his bat. -- SWTPC6800 00:44, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't know why there is a 300 pixel limit instead of a 200 or a 400 pixel limit on the template, and suspect someone just made that up. If so there's no force of policy there, just part of the instructions on the template. If the template instructions tell people to say "yes" if it's under 300 pixels, one takes "yes" to mean that, and many people are just saying "yes." The exact text from the template is: Images must generally be of low resolution. The rule of thumb for raster images is no more than 300 pixels in width or height, which ensures that the image's resolution is less than 0.1 megapixels. If you are using an image of higher resolution, please explain why. If the image is 0.1 megapixels or less, just put "Yes". Wikidemo 01:46, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

You misunderstand...there isn't a 300x300 limit. It's just that if you use an image of higher resolution, you need to explain why. 0.1 megapixels and below it's clearly low resolution and there's no real need to have a drawn-out explanation. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 03:13, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

At the risk of talking to the wind, the problem that we have is that if everyone can make rationale templates in user space that have no standardization of template name then a bot will never be able to tell whether a template exists on the page or not. That's it. No one is trying to make a bot that can understand fair use rationales, so that whole weird tangential discussion I don't think is very relevant. I don't care if we subst templates, or even really if there are standard good ones that we transclude that all have the same naming convention. The non-sustainable option though is letting anyone make a rationale named anything they want. You may think that having to parse the template to get any meaningful information isn't a big problem, but it actually is. I don't know how I can convince you of that, but it's true. - cohesion 02:48, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

It's very true. That's why bots should not be determining whether an image has an adequate rationale or not. It's just not a task than an automated process can feasibly perform with any reasonable level of accuracy. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 03:07, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

But we don't have bots doing that. -- Ned Scott 05:02, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps you misunderstand. Nothing weird or tangential, it's actually quite fundamental. The Foundation has required that we make this machine-readable. Automating image use and categories is a good idea and quite important. People who seriously uses copyrighted images do this. You don't simply give editors a blank screen and tell them to type what is going on. You create data fields and some kind of structure for them to record what the image is, where it came from, why it is used, the type of use, what have you. If you are working with a logo, say, "used in infobox = sporting team" or "used to identify subject of logo= yes", "Owner = Miami Dolphins", etc. means a lot more than "this is a sports team logo belonging to the team known as Miami Dolphins used for purposes of critical commentary...." Wikidemo 03:45, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

First, the foundation:Resolution:Licensing policy states that non-free content must be machine identifiable. This is achieved by licensing tags, as Ned stated above and people have reiterated a number of times. Neither the foundation nor anyone else hope to make a machine readable rationale. Second, I am not arguing against parameterized templates as I have stated about 4 times. I am only saying that short meaninglessly named templates in user space are a bad idea. I don't feel as if we are communicating at all and my only goal was to see if there was consensus, there obviously isn't, and I see no reason to continue. - cohesion 04:22, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

One problem with parameterised templated rationales is that a rationale can make sense when it was written, according to what the template said at the time, but if someone later updates or changes the template, then you risk turning large numbers of the previous rationales into nonsense. This is the same reason why we cannot change the text inside the licensing and copyright tags, but have to create a new license instead (if you change the text inside the license tag you will be changing the license for the thousands of images already using that license tag). Carcharoth 12:01, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Sure, but that's a problem with all templates, not just rationale templates. Old templates have to be deprecated, not deleted or changed. It's a good argument for consolidating templates and getting a few, centrally approved ones in place rather than an ad-hoc system. But that can only happen when people stop opposing templates on principle. If people are going to be contrarians, insist that consensus is necessary before a template may be used, then turn around and scuttle attempts at consensus on claim that all templates are invalid rationales, we'll never have that process up and running. The last attempts to create use rationale templates got blanked and caught up in an edit war. Wikidemo 03:59, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Licensing templates must be (and are) machine readable. Those are not and should not be considered fair-use rationales. (Examples of licensing tags: {{albumcover}}, {{logo}}, {{GFDL-self}}). On the other hand, fair-use rationales must not be (and are not) boilerplated. Each rationale must address why one individual use of one image is appropriate under both United States law and the nonfree image requirements. Since the reason why will differ every time, the rationale must each time be handwritten. There is a template to assist with writing such rationales, and that's fine (so long as it doesn't lead to one-liner, effectively boilerplate ones), but under no circumstances could a fair-use rationale be fully done by template. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 10:15, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

But the reason often is the same from time to time, and handwritten rationales are generally useless. Those are two of the issues. Pretending it's otherwise does nobody any good. Wikidemo 10:27, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I'll jump back in because "pretending" sounds more contentious than I intended. The point is that you have to look at the actual uses that are truly in place in Wikipedia, and that make for an encyclopedia. More than half of the image uses, far more than half by the time we get rid of the improper ones, fit cleanly in a dozen or two very clearly defined types of use: movie posters illustrating articles about films, album covers on album articles, various logos used to identify the things they stand for, pictures of notable contemporary artwork used in articles about the art, etc. These categories can be parameterized quite easily, and made machine readable, but they are not. I understand why a line was drawn between copyrighttags for the images, and rationales for the use, but the line is not drawn very well. Asking people to arrive at the same message about use through independent handwritten composition one hundred fifty thousand times does not clarify the subject at all from the standpoint of legality, freedom of downstream use, automation, or any other purpose I can conceive. Wikidemo 19:00, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

There is not agreement that "illustrative" use (covers, logos) is always acceptable. It may turn out that we come out in the various cases that it is. What is policy, and always has been, is that acceptability is determined case by case, use by use, never by category. If the cover of one album is iconic and discussed in the article, it may be acceptable and non-decorative. If the cover in another album is a pretty for the infobox, and the cover itself is not discussed or of particular importance to the album, I would hold that it's decorative. There are still differences, even within a given category. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:03, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

There should be agreement, and decorativeness is not a relevant issue with images, but that's a different subject. It has never been policy that acceptability is uncategorizable. That is a misunderstanding of what it means for something to be evaluated case by case. A while back someone looked to the jurisprudence on copyright and found the comment that fair use is evaluated on a case by case basis. That statement got put into the fair use policy and some people have been misinterpreting it ever since. Case by case review is a common judicial standard in law, and it does not preclude the application of categories, rules, and boilerplate language.

Requiring hand-tooled arguments doesn't do any good for our goal of free use any more than it does for the law. If the policy were to shift or a downstream user were to decide to exclude a type of image - to take your example, logos used for identification in articles that don't comment about the logo itself, a well-thought-out set of parameters and categories is still the way to go. It is best answered with a yes/no variable, or an optional field like the new templates now have. With that information you can quickly sort all the immages according to which do and do not have commentary on the images. If the policy shifts and all we have are free text handwritten explanations, that is barely better than no explanation at all. You cannot sort on free form text so have to go to the images one by one to figure out which to discard. Moreover, there is no guarantee, less of a chance in fact, that people will happen to type in the new information you are looking for. At best it is spotty, and rationales are so badly written that most are of no help at all. You end up going back to the image and the article. Wikidemo 22:13, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Status on a Japanese image

I noticed Image:Tagosaku to Mokube no Tokyo Kenbutsu.jpg has an interesting situation. The image originates from Japan, and in Japan it is considered to be in the public domain (author died in 1955 + 50 years). The uploader has tagged it as fair use, since the US does the life of the author + 70 years. But that got me wondering, since it originated from Japan, wouldn't it still be PD even for the US? -- Ned Scott 03:52, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

The critical question is when the image went PD in Japan. If it was PD before 1996, then it is also PD in the U.S. But if it was not PD in Japan in 1996, then it is now copyright for life + 70, under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act of 1994.

Copyright in Japan for the image is life + 50 (under the Japanese Copyright law of 1971), and that would only have expired in 2005, which is after 1996, so (regrettably) it remains in copyright in the U.S. until 2025. Jheald 09:05, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Isn't this public domain in the United States because it was published in 1902? This is the second-to-last bullet listed at the top of Template talk:PD-US. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 23:12, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Ooops. Yes, you're quite right. Cut-off date is actually 1 July 1909 (or 1923, except in the 9th circuit) [3] Jheald 23:27, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Great. I'm glad we got this figured out. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 23:50, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not free

It takes money to run the servers and like public television Wikipedia is dependent on viewer contributions. The zeal to remove 100,000 "illegal" images will result in thousands of good images being removed by mistake. Our viewer will notice and Wikipedia will loose some customers. Some free content zealots would be happy with a text only encyclopedia. That would really attract cash contributions.

I upload my photos of classic computers as public domain. The magazine covers I upload have elaborate image descriptions that I keep updating to meet the latest Fair Use rational requirements. That still didn't prevent one of my older public domain images from being tagged as a copyright violation and deleted in less than 12 hours without my receiving any notification. I noticed and have restored the image.

I am sure that valuable content is disappearing from Wikipedia in the quest for free content. The sad part it that irreplaceable images are being lost because the up-loader is no longer active or no one notices. We need an archive of the deleted images and a procedure so that editors can find and restore the valid images in the future.

My photo that was deleted is used here, Kansas_City_standard#Floppy-ROM. I uploaded it in February 2006 and user Museo8bits moved it to the Commons in 2006. It shows a special type of record that can be bound in a magazine. On 17:22, 26 July 2007 it was tagged as a Copyright Violation. (You can see partial sentences in the magazine.) Museo8bits challenged the copyvio at 21:57, 26 July 2007. Around 24:00, 26 July 2007 user Polarlys deleted the image. (He appears to be the German version of Betacommand.) At 03:36, 27 July 2007 CommonsDelinker removed the "FloppyRom_Magazine.jpg" links in three Wikipedia articles. It took about ten hours to remove all traces of a valid image. -- SWTPC6800 18:51, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Actually, the problem with the image is likely that it appears to be a derivative work of a copyrighted work. You can't remove the copyright on an image by taking a photograph of it. You might want to reconsider the tag on this image, since you don't really have the rights to release it into the public domain (indeed, this is likely why it was deleted in the first place!). (ESkog)^(Talk) 18:58, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

What portions of the photo have a copyright problem? Is it the utilitarian text on the record label? Is it the sentence fragments on the folded page? Is it the sentence from the advertisement? What needs to be fixed? (I have blurred some text.)

Do you have a problem with Image:Bookcase.JPG? The edges of the book covers are readable. -- SWTPC6800 19:26, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

The difference is that the bookcase image isn't *about* the books, and their inclusion is incidental to the content. The image in question is pretty clearly meant to depict that this was in the magazine in question, so it's a derivative work. That is, incidentally, why the image is currently tagged for speedy deletion from Commons. (ESkog)^(Talk) 20:15, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Would a photo of an Evatone sound sheet out of a magazine have a copyright problem? They were often delivered to customers in magazines. [[4]] The photo is about how software (or audio) could be delivered bound in a magazine. You need some magazine to show that. I have blurred the text in the magazine. I am trying to follow all of the rules.

The image was restored in the Commons because the copyright violation process was not followed. My issue was that someone can make a questionable claim of copyright violation and the image is deleted within hours. (Even after the copyvio claim was disputed.) -- SWTPC6800 20:52, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

That is a copyright violation of the magazine? Get a grip, will you? It shows a minimal and largely unreadable part of an old magazine. Heavens, how about some common sense instead of pissing off valuable contributors just for the fun of it. Malc82 22:24, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Music notation images

We would do well to describe the acceptable and unacceptable use of musical notation. Hyacinth 21:22, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Do you mean for copyrighted songs? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 21:37, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Looks like these two rather odd taggings by User:17Drew (formerly User:ShadowHalo). I thought we went through all this once already in Archive 22 here. But seems Drew still doesn't get it. Jheald 23:01, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

What we went over was that since the information being presented in images of sheet music is copyrighted, using a higher resolution doesn't increase the amount of the work being used. I fail to see what that has to do with needing a historical illustration of added tone chords when the history of added tone chords isn't mentioned in the article at all. 17Drew 23:46, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm no musician, but it seems to me entirely fair use to give two examples of how added tone chords, the subject of the article, have been used by notable modern classical composers. Jheald 23:54, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

And...? As has been mentioned here ad nauseum, policy is much stricter than copyright law. The text makes no mention of how modern classical composers use added tone chords. The closest thing is just an unsourced list of examples where they're used, with no discussion of any of the songs. 17Drew 00:07, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't see that this is any different to how, say, Climax (figure of speech) uses examples by particular authors to illustrate the figure of speech. Jheald 00:35, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

And doesn't need to justify their inclusion based on this policy. Plus, most of those are public domain anyway. 17Drew 00:41, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

CC 3.0 in project space?

I just noticed that the image Image:Active users.png, which was being used in an upcoming article for the Wikipedia Signpost, was deleted. The image was from Citizendium, and licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 attribution share alike. Is there any way around this problem, so that the image could be used for the article? Since this is only intended for the Signpost, not for content that we expect to have downstream users and modifiers for, would it be permissible to compose a rationale for limited use (as we do with fair use claims, though this wouldn't be fair use and would be in project space)?--ragesoss 03:29, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Would it be a good idea to ask Aleksander Stos if he'd be willing to license it under the {{cc-by-sa-2.5}} (or 1.0 or 2.0)? 17Drew 03:33, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Why isn't cc-by-sa-3.0 considered free? Is there discussion on this somewhere that I haven't seen? – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 03:40, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

It has a new term, preserving the integrity of the author or something like that. 17Drew 03:50, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

As I understand it, it's because it includes language that can be interpreted to disallow use that violates the creator's moral rights, including possibly the "right to prevent distortion, mutilation, or modification that would prejudice the author's honor or reputation". It's a matter of debate whether the license grants the morals rights or simply does not constitute a waiver of them in jurisdictions where they are automatically granted. I don't know where the mailing list and on-wiki discussion about this has taken place, though.--ragesoss 03:51, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Scratch that. See comments from Erik and Jimbo. A couple of days ago, the notice on commons that cc-by-3.0 couldn't be used alone was removed, so it looks like it's now being used on Commons. And I'm assuming that means that we can use it here. 17Drew 03:55, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

A decision has not yet been made. See commons:Commons talk:Licensing/Creative Commons 3.0, and commons:Commons talk:Licensing. The changes to the templates seem to have simply been performed by Ikiwaner regardless of whether the discussions have reached a conclusion or not, so I wouldn't put too much stock in that just yet. --bainer (talk) 13:16, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

"Press license"-template

A template which has existed here on en-wiki since 2004 was removed from Commons because Finnish Defence Forces do not allow commercial usage or deriative works. Well, the template exists here, and I've uploaded a bunch of images that were removed from Commons. I'm not very familiar with US copyright laws, but is Category:Finnish Defence Forces images a valid "non-free" category and template? Do I need to provide a rationale for fair use, eventhough they allow reproducing if source for www.mil.fi is provided? So basicly it doesn't matter whether they allow reproducing or not, it's still same fair use, or? --Pudeo⺮ 10:22, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

That's right. Because the license doesn't freely allow commercial usage and derivative works, WP considers it "non-free content". So it's only to be used if it's needed and passes all of the policy requirements; and then it needs to have a rationale to say why it's needed, and why it would still be fair use even for a downstream commercial re-user. Jheald 10:30, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Should the template be removed and replaced perhaphs with {{Non-free promotional}}? Maybe it can be saved as a side note for the source.. But some deletions will be required, I doubt all of them pass as fair use. --Pudeo⺮ 10:41, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I tweaked it a little to make it clearer that it's non-free. Yeah we should probably merge it with something more generic once the rename process gets that far. It's listed under Wikipedia:Non-free content/templates#Non-free Government so suggeestions on what to do with it should probably be posted there like we did with lots of the overly spesific screenshot and logo tags we had and such. --Sherool (talk) 10:58, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Do the Finish Air Forces release press kits? Anyway, not every image known to have come from a press kit or similar source is ok to be used. How many of these images are replaceable by free alternatives, for instance? And how many of them are necessary for the reader's understanding of the topic? --Abu badali ^(talk) 22:19, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

It can be considered an electronic press kit if they put a huge freakin sign on their website that says "download and use this free of charge" -Nard 00:01, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

An editor of TIME magazine writes in...

I thought people might be interested in this, from the IfD on Einstein as TIME's person of the century. The editor himself of the magazine at the time has weighed in, urging us to keep it. Jheald 11:32, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

The editor seems to imply the copyright belongs to Einstein's widow. If the copyright does belong to Time, and they want us to keep the image, they could simply change the license. I am sure that they want to push the "iconic" nature of their man of the year covers, and would love for us to reinforce their brand by including those images here. Note that the editor repeatedly points out that it is not the image of Einstein but the image of the cover that we should include. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:34, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand your point, Carl. The cover is the image that's being used, and Time has the copyright to that. They just don't have copyright to the image by itself. I don't dispute that this serves Time's interest, but I think it also serves the greater community's interest, too, so I don't see the problem. I know the cover has significance to me, and from what other editors have written, I'm definitely not alone. (Note: I am in no way affiliated with Time Magazine.) Ben Hocking ^{(talk|contribs)} 16:30, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Time Magazine is in the business of dealing with relevant events and issues of interest to the public. Its covers are, to a significant extent, themselves a part of common public history. Not only is it in Time Magazine's interest to have various cover images displayed in the context of writing about the topics they deal with, but it is also classic "fair use", whether they are technically "free images" or not. Additionally, Time Magazine routinely grants requests to use low-resolution reproductions of the cover of issues with relevant cover stories without a second thought. Despite the sometimes contorted "rules" or "guidelines" that occasionally emerge from the internal debates within the wiki, low resolution reproductions of these cover images in WP articles about a particular topic serve to indicate that the topic was deemed by a major news magazine such as Time to be worthy of presentation on their cover, in a way that a mere textual statement that e.g. "X was featured on the cover of magagine Y on date Z" cannot. Everyone's interest is served by its not-for-profit fair use in such a context. ... Kenosis 20:29, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Too much talk... please read the nomination. Nobody said this use is not "fair use". It's about either or not this image helps in the comprehension of the topic is a way that words alone can not. --Abu badali ^(talk) 20:49, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I beg to differ. There are important policy implications involved that deserve closer scrutiny and further discussion. Thus, more discussion is merited on this and similar issues related to validity of use on the wiki in order to attempt to achieve the best possible long-term growth and health of the project. ... Kenosis 21:03, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I think there are very few pictures that can be completely replaced by words. Clearly, this picture "helps in the comprehension of the topic in a way that words alone can not." So, the question is, does it help sufficently to justify its cost? What is its cost? Well, I suppose slightly more bandwith demands, and some might argue that it somehow hurts the article, although I can't imagine how. So, I'll turn the question around, since most of us seem to think it "helps in the comprehension" - what is the cost of including this particular picture that makes you think it is not worthwhile? (This is a sincere question.) Ben Hocking ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:02, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

The cost is compromising Wikipedia's mission to be an encyclopedia of free content that anyone can use for any purpose. —Bkell (talk) 22:14, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I think you would have a very valid point if there weren't already thousands of such images in Wikipedia with no call for them to be deleted. Ben Hocking ^{(talk|contribs)} 23:55, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

The cost of tying the quality of our articles to non-free content.

But anyway, I don't see the question as relevant at all. Indeed, there are very few pictures that can be completely replaced by words. But the policy doesn't ask us to completely replace pictures by words. It only says that when the same encyclopedic value can be achieved by words, we should prefer writing these words. --Abu badali ^(talk) 22:15, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

What "question"? What "cost"?. This discussion, far from being "irrelevant, is in exactly the correct place (or at least one of several), which is the talk page of Wikipedia:Non-free content.

This notion of "non-free" is a completely false distinction that quite evidently is widely misunderstood merely because it's referred to as "non-free". There are explicit permissions for "fair-use", particularly of low-resolution images that have no commercial value, images of purely historical interest, etc., etc. To overly confuse "fair-use" with "non-free" in a way that implies "fair-use" involves "cost" would be to virtually hogtie this project when dealing with historical topics, dealing with most public personalities, and indeed dealing with a wide variety of topics where images are capable of conveying far more than the mere verbal descriptions in the articles' body text. I do, however, begin to understand why this page is presently locked. Well, in any event, WP is very much in its childhood, and I presume much of this will eventually get sorted out in due time. ... Kenosis 23:27, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

"The cost of tying the quality of our articles to non-free content." You'll note that I specified "this particular picture", because whether or not this picture is deleted, the quality of our articles is already tied to non-free content. I think it is quite arguable that the same encyclopeic value cannot be achieved by words, so again I think it is a balance of cost to benefit. I see no noticeable cost associated with keeping this image. As long as there are a few "non-free" images that one allows should be kept, I do not see how the additional cost of having others is signficant - as long as they follow "fair-use" guidelines. Ben Hocking ^{(talk|contribs)} 23:55, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

To those that question the value of "free" versus "non-free" images, I kept trying for weeks to explain it to my wife. I finally hit upon a simple explanation that satisfied both of us. Sure, Time Magazine wants us to use their magazine cover on Einstein. But can I photoshop a monkey's butt onto his face (create a derivative work) and then sell T-shirts of it (commercial use)? Because that's what Wikipedia stands for. Freedom to do anything with the content, even replacing your face with a monkey's butt and selling T-shirts of it. -Nard 00:05, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

I see. So this is part of an underlying debate about what WP is for. AFAIK, the just-given "monkey's butt" analogy rests on a very mistaken analysis of what consitutes copyright "infringement". Holding too strongly to this kind of broad and highly oversimplified interpretation that what WP is for -- i.e., only for "free" content to do whatever one wishes without any further responsiblity on anyone's part--- would IMO involve extremely high "cost" to the public good this project does. If an article displays a "free" image and someone else uses it for an illegal purpose or one subject to civil penalty, the legal responsiblity rests on the person abusing the image. So "only free images" doesn't provide the option of unfettered feeling of freedom to use images in whatever way they want, as would appear to be what is sought by some users.

Similarly it is with fair use. The fair-use criteria are, in fact, a legal entitlement for WP users just like any other person or group. Such use is an entitlement that does not place responsibility on WP for possible abuse of images by third parties. The legal responsibility in e.g., defamation law and copyright law, begins no earlier than the first ab - user, and not with the prior legitimate user. This is, of course, why the criteria for "non-free" content exist and continue to be discussed, and why it's important to put the right info in the right place on the image page-- so that folks out there are duly notified what the status of the image is, available for them to double-check when these bright ideas may hit them about what to put on that teeshirt mentioned above. ... Kenosis 00:42, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

The fair use exemption in United States law is extremely broad. Nobody is questioning that using the magazine cover in an article on Einstein qualifies as fair use. It would qualify even if we sold our content. But there are limitations. I could not legally sell that T-shirt (defamation laws aside, Time would highly object to its headline being used above the offensive image of Einstein with a monkey's butt on his face). I couldn't reprint the whole article accompanying the picture. Wikipedia uses highly strict rules on fair use, so much that they've stopped calling it fair use and started calling it non-free content. Calling for free intellectual content is a slow revolution that is changing the world, and I personally am proud that Wikipedia is slowly changing the way the world does business. Time after time actors and singers have agreed to release a freely licensed picture after being explained what we do. They don't necessarily understand it, but it is my hope that someday copyleft is a household word, the same way copyright is now. -Nard 01:13, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

For "free" and freedom in this context see freedomdefined.org. Although Nard's "butt scenario" is good too :) - cohesion 01:39, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

I would like to refocus the discussion a little. In this particular case, it is not a discussion of free content vs. non-free content. I assume that everyone would prefer a free image over a non-free one, even at a slight loss in quality of the image. The example given by Nard illustrates exactly what I see as the problem. TIME is never going to intentionally let this cover be non-free. Even if someone couldn't photoedit a monkey butt on the picture (trademark law would probably prevent that type of disparaging use of even a free picture), TIME wouldn't want copies of the cover printed on T shirts and sold commercially. So the choice is between a fair use image that passes some higher-than-legally-required minimum and no image at all. There are always going to be non-free images that for one reason or another simply cannot be replaced by free images. Unless we are going to forbid ALL non-free images (which, at least so far, is not on the table), then the basic question is whether Wikipedia (and not just the particular article) is "better" with the image or without it. I assume that in almost all cases, the article will be better with the image than without. But in many cases, the cost to Wikipedia may outweigh the benefit to the article. What cost? As Bkell said, it may be the cost of "compromising Wikipedia's mission to be an encyclopedia of free content that anyone can use for any purpose". But is an article which must explain in text what could be better explained by a non-free image a good trade off. It seems to me that in many cases the mantra "free, free" forgets the word "encyclopedia". I understand that a line has to be drawn somewhere but I fail to see why the line keeps getting moved to include fewer and fewer images when everyone appears to concede that some non-free images will exist. To put it in purely arbitrary numerical terms, if we have policies that already exclude 89% of all possible non-free images, how much do we gain by tweaking our rules to knock out another 1%? Do we then tweak them again to knock out another 0.5% once the dust settles? Who benefits and who loses? I think the second half of the answer is the reader of the encyclopedia. -- DS1953 ^talk 02:00, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Stating that the choice is between "nonfree" and "none" is a false dichotomy. Some images of Einstein saw their copyright expire, so public-domain images (such as this one) certainly do exist. When we've got both free and nonfree images, and the free image is adequate (not necessarily great, not necessarily the best in the world, just adequate to illustrate the subject) we use the free one. Every time. If there weren't PD images of Einstein available at all, I'd be inclined to agree with you. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 03:09, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

You're right, of course, with respect to the article on Albert Einstein. I see I was not clear, but I was really addressing the use of the image on TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century. But even more broadly I was trying to address (again, not very clearly) the second sentence in criteria #8 that reads "Non-free media files are not used if they can be replaced by text that serves a similar function." Unless you assume that the second sentence is a meaningless repetition of the concept contained in the first sentence, what we appear to be now rather clearly saying is that even if a media file's "presence would significantly increase readers' understanding of the topic, and its omission would be detrimental to that understanding", it should not be used if it "can be replaced by text that serves a similar function." In other words, if you have a choice between "none" and "not free", then we must choose "none" if it can be replaced with text even though the image may make comprehension of the article easier for an average reader (which is often the role of an image), make the article easier and quicker to read by breaking up the text, or serve one of the many other roles than images play in increasing readers' understanding of the topic. I hope I am being clear that I am NOT claiming that it is ALWAYS a choice between none and non-free because there are always going to be some images that simply cannot be explained in text (try explaining Guernica without an image). I am simply saying that in many cases the choice is only between not-free or none because free will never be available. In those cases, if an image meets all the other criteria (including the first sentence of #8), it seems to be we are hurting the encyclopedia by arguing "free" or "none" (OK, "free" or "text" but I am trying to make a point here) when free is not a choice. -- DS1953 ^talk 03:50, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Hang on. Let's say we had three pictures of Einstein. One as a child, one as a middle-aged man, and one as an old man. And only one is a free picture. If the fair-use reasons for using the other two are strong enough, then all three should be used in the article on Einstein. For historical subjects like this, it is most certainly not a case of "chuck out all other pics once a free pic is available". For living people, where pics are replaceable, yes, I can understand that. But for cases where a picture is not replaceable, then fair-use can sometimes be the only way to use a picture to improve an article. Also, still on the topic of historical pictures, I would point people again to Category:Photographs and Category:Non-free historic images. What is to stop someone putting {{Non-free historic image}} on Image:Einstein TIME Person of the Century.jpg? Where is the borderline drawn between historic images and non-historic images? Carcharoth 04:19, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

(In response to DS1953) That was a misunderstanding on my part, I apologize. For that article, I think it depends on whether the image itself, or the honor given, is what's considered historic and iconic. In the case of Guernica, its status as a historic and iconic image is indisputable, and the complexity of that picture could never be fully captured in text, so I don't think that's a good comparison. The article on Guernica is also indisputably discussing the image itself, and having that image there and visible serves a purpose that text alone cannot. In the case of Einstein, are we discussing the image or the event? Seems to me more the event, and the message the image conveys would be pretty much the same as the message the text would convey ("Albert Einstein was selected as Time Magazine's Person of the Century."). I guess I fail to see why an image gets that point across better than that single sentence.

(In response to Cacharoth) The line there would probably be as to whether the image itself is a significant point of discussion. Guernica is a good example there; we can find tons of reliable material which discusses that image and attests to its historic and iconic nature. The same is true of Image:TrangBang.jpg. The question is, does the image illustrate some point in history, or is the image itself a historical icon which has been widely discussed? Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 07:47, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Reading that Einstein is man of the century, and seeing that for yourself, are two different things. But I think people are using that as a springboard for asking the question, does the policy really serve the goal of free content? In this case the image is effectively free, as the former editor points out. Yet the policy arguably says it should not be included. If that's the case, is there something wrong with the policy or the interpretation of policy? Wikidemo 08:17, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

One of the questions presented at the end of Carcharoth's comment above ("What is to stop someone putting {{Non-free historic image}} on Image:Einstein TIME Person of the Century.jpg?") appears to make explicit what some other users have also impled, if not explictly stated. The response to this question, IMO, is that nothing can stop all persons who post on WP from misrepresenting fair-use justifications, just as nothing will stop all persons who post on WP from misrepresenting "free" images as having been properly given over to the public domain under a "free license". Bottom line: a free license is not a legal entitlement for either WP users or "third parties" outside WP to avoid responsiblity to respect the legal rights of others in the world, just as "fair use" is not a legal entitlement for others to abuse what is legally displayed on WP articles. Thus far in this talk section, AFAICT, the only reasonably accurate disctinction I have seen is that the distinction between "free" and "non-free" is an inaccurate, or at least widely misunderstood, distinction. The proper distinctions, AFAIK, are among the follwing non-exhaustive possibilities: "in the public domain", "possibly copyrighted", "based on available evidence, subject to copyright protection", "based on available evidence, subject to copyright protection but explicitly made available for non-profit reproduction", "based on available evidence, copyrighted with right of reproduction for any purpose subject only to the explicit written permission of the copyright holder", and a few other variations on these. Of interest here should be the fact that in US law, at least, the "fine print" in many copyrighted publications says (roughly) the last of these, yet even the last of these commonly is still avaliable to be used under "fair use" as to brief quotations, low-resolution cover reproductions, etc. (Question: If I pile up a bunch of books and your book's cover-art happens to be visible in the pile within my photographic image: [Answer all three] (1) Do you want to argue with the extra exposure you get from my photo? [Check one: Yes - No - Maybe ______________ (If "maybe", explain in space provided, or on an attached page)]; (2) Does copyright law actually protect you from all representations of your book for all purposes without having negotiated a contract with you? Check one: Yes - No - Neither (If "neither", explain here ______________, or on an attached separate page)]; (3) In countries where the there is a constitutional option to speak freely about your book, does your country's laws forbid display of an image of your book with the cover closed? Yes - No - Maybe - None of these (If "maybe" or "none of these", explain here ______________, or on an attached page)]) Bottom line is, the distinction between "free" and "non-free" is at best potentially misleading, and at worst, completely false. The ten criteria for "fair use" are stated in Wikipedia:Non-free content for good reasons, however arguable some of them may be, and however arguable thay may be be as to precisely how they're to be interpreted and written into the guidelines. ... Kenosis 08:21, 30 July 2007 (UTC) ... Quick additonal note: Yes, the "book cover" issue would, AFAIK, also apply to magazine covers in general. I apologize for any additonal confusion that may arise there, as I recognize the policy disussion already involves many specific issues. ... Kenosis 08:38, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

What the image actually looks like isn't important. We can say it with text, and document the whole thing, and be just as informative. -- Ned Scott 08:43, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Toll road logos

The foundation policy has a lot about what images can be excepted, including logos, but does not get into where they can be used at all. Our policy states that "Non-free content is used only if its presence would significantly increase readers' understanding of the topic, and its omission would be detrimental to that understanding. Non-free media files are not used if they can be replaced by text that serves a similar function." But again this can be interpreted as referring to the image file, and not each use. The basic dispute is over whether the following (mockup) usage of the New Jersey Turnpike logo is acceptable:

Intersections

• Interstate 80 in Footown
• Image:New Jersey Turnpike Shield.svg New Jersey Turnpike in Barville

It's been argued that using the logo in this way helps "visual readers". Is this a valid reason to use it like this? --NE2 17:56, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Kindly see Wikipedia_talk:Non-free_content#To_throw_it_out_there.2C_road_signs for a discussion of the identification use of non-free road signs. Wikidemo 18:00, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Looke like decorative use to me. Wikipedia is not a travel planner, there is no need to add ilustrations to a list of ensyclopedia articles about various roads. I also linkified the images seeing as non-free images are not allowed on talk pages. --Sherool (talk) 20:03, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

• Image:I-80.svg is a free image. Image:New Jersey Turnpike Shield.svg is tagged as non-free, but I don't think that's correct. If it was first "published" (printed on signs) before 1963 without a copyright notice, it's public domain. The article mentions the "unusual exit signage that was considered the pinnacle of highway building in the 1950s." Sounds PD to me. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 20:37, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
  • If the image is really non-free, then its current usage (only in the article about the turnpike itself) is correct. However, I think Quadell is right that the image is actually in the public domain. (ESkog)^(Talk) 22:22, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
  • The turnpike sign is just an arrangement of typography with no artwork. That means it's not eligible for copyright in the US regardless of when it was published, or whether or not it ever carried a copyright notice. TCC (talk) (contribs) 23:12, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
    • I wouldn't be sure of that. It might be considered ineligible for copyright, but it might not be. It really depends on the judge. (There is typography, but there's also a specific placement of letters in a way that is not merely the presentation of a word.) In these cases, I'd say it's better to be safe than sorry. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 13:45, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
      • Image:Pennsylvania Turnpike logo.svg and Image:OhioTurnpike.svg are almost certainly ineligible for copyright. The New Jersey Turnpike logo is unclear; Image:Garden State Parkway shield.png is certainly into eligible territory. --NE2 15:30, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
        • No, the Turnpike sign isn't unclear at all. I was recently involved in a discussion about the PD status of a large page of calligraphy at the Commons: if a lengthy and elaborate piece of calligraphy isn't copyrightable, then this certainly isn't. Work distinguished by mere typography or calligraphy is specifically excluded from copyright by law.
        • As for the Parkway sign, there's nothing certainly copyrightable about it. It's entirely composed of non-copyrightable elements: An outline map of New Jersey with a superimposed bar and circle and some typographical arrangement. I'd say it's in the same class as the Turnpike sign. TCC (talk) (contribs) 21:55, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
          • OK, then replace it with Image:Fort Bend Parkway Toll Road shield.svg, which presumably has enough to be copyrightable. I don't understand the "calligraphy" defense though; wouldn't that make many corporate logos, such as Image:The Walt Disney Company.png and Image:100 PLUS Logo.jpg, public domain? --NE2 22:13, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
            • Yes. Which is why they're also protected under trademark law. But I was only talking about those two cases, not toll road "logos" in general. (They're not really logos in the normal sense of the word.) If I was, I'd say your new example isn't copyrightable either, as a "familiar symbol or design". See [5]. TCC (talk) (contribs) 22:54, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
              • (It's a "dirty little secret" that most logos aren't copyrighted. Just trademarked. Entirely different set of laws.) – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 04:04, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
    • Requirements for originality/creativity for copyright are lower in the UK, so this isn't necessarily relevant to U.S. law; but readers may be interested in this UK story today: Council buys copyright in street signs. Jheald 09:19, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

So if the logo has a trademark, is it likely public domain as well? --Holderca1 18:33, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Not necessarily; things can be trademarked and copyrighted. --NE2 19:03, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

To expand on that, some things can be both trademarked and copyrighted, but some things that are trademarked have either fallen into the public domain in terms of copyright, or are ineligible for copyright in the first place. For example, you can't copyright a single word or title, but you can trademark both.

There are a few important differences between trademark and copyright law for the purposes of Wikipedia. Although there's no restriction on using or freely reproducing uncopyrighted tradmarks, you can't do so in any way that associates the mark with any product other than the one it's owner uses it for, and you have to identify it as a tradmark and indicate the owner. Also, unlike copyright, a trademark has to be officially registered and marked with ®, or at least marked with ™ if used prior to registration, and be actively defended by its owner or it will be considered abandoned. If you have never seen either trademark symbol on a toll road "logo", it's certain to be not a trademark. TCC (talk) (contribs) 00:34, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

If it's a registered trademark, does it need to be marked? I have found several of the toll shields searching the trademark/patent office. --Holderca1 03:02, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Now that I looked it up, I see I was confused in this regard. Failing to identify the mark with ® or ™ just means that the owner of the mark won't be able to collect damages in case of infringement. (Trademark Act, Title III, §29) The thing he has to guard against is the mark becoming a generic identifier for the service or product. In the case of the New Jersey Turnpike shield above, here's its registration: [6] Apparently under that registration they use it on keychains, t-shirts, hats, and -- weirdly -- toll collection as distinct from actually operating the road. TCC (talk) (contribs) 03:56, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia doesn't have much of a policy on trademarks, and they aren't very applicable to Wikipedia. The only two ways in which a trademark is ever infringed is confusion -- the mark is used to brand another service in a way that confuses users as the source or sponsorship of a good or service -- or tarnishment, a mark is used by a different good or service in a way that dilutes the association people have with the original, or that creates negative associations. Use of logos in encyclopedia articles simply doesn't raise these concerns. As a matter of accuracy we don't want people associating a trademark with the wrong thing but that's far from a legal problem. The closest we get is where we're using trademarks for books, encyclopedias, websites, etc., we want to make it clear that the use is for discussion purposes, and not in a way that could lead people to think there's some affiliation with Wikipedia. Free content and trademarks don't really intersect. No matter what you're doing, if you're branding a good or service you have to watch your trademarks. Not much we can do to help that. Wikidemo 04:23, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

In what circumstances would you trademark something that has a copyright? If it has a copyright, no one can use your image anyway. Also, wouldn't it stand to reason that a company that has registered a trademark for an image/logo, that it would also register it with the copyright office as well if it could? --Holderca1 13:23, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Trademark gives you a different and broader set of rights than copyright, and different enforcement tools. If someone infringes both your copyright and trademark at the same time the damages and enforcement options are cumulative. So you can double, or more, the strength of your position. As an intellectual property owner one goes for as much protection as possible by filing both copyright and trademark registrations if available. Trademark is usually the stronger and more versatile right. Indeed the best are so simple they can't be copyrighted, like the word "Apple" in connection with computers, software, and tech products.

But take a simpler case of the world famous Pebble Beach tree. All the photographs, and the stylized graphical designs used to represent it are copyrighted. For example, | this logo is copyrighted. And so is any photo they use. However, people can make their own free photographs like this one. The copyright only prevents people from making an exact copy of their letterhead and photos. The trademark more broadly prevents people from branding a golf course, hotel, resort, restaurant, and likely a wide array of merchandise, with a cypress tree. It could be a different cypress tree, one in your back yard, but you still can't use it as the logo for a golf course. The limits of the copyright are that it only extends to direct copyrighting. Trademarks also guard against substitute versions, independently-derived things that are too similar, and so on. Hope that helps. Wikidemo 19:26, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Fair use deletions of living persons

It seems there is a push to delete all living persons photographs. Including photographs that clearly meet fair-use rationale. My run in with this was the deletion of an elected public official that has an official publicity photo owned by a government entity for publicity purposes File:HUPPENTHAL.gif. The rationale for deleting it is problematic while fair use inclusion is clear.

1. Photographs are difficult to take in official areas due to security.
2. Photographs taken by wikipedia editors are not reliably sourced.
3. No free photographs exist as far as I can tell.
4. Deleting living person photos weakens the case for other fair use defenses as it is a de facto admission that it is not okay to keep them.
5. There is something inherently wrong with a policy that allows a screen shot of a likeness on a copyrighted show but the official publicity image is not okay.
6. There is no legal distinction between copyrighted photos of dead people vs. living people.

In cases where there is fair use defense, the deletioner should provide the free image that allegedley exists. If they cannot, then they should not delete the image. The drive for free content is admirable but should not be at the expense of legal encyclopedic content. This is the rationale for allowing fair use of images of dead people even though it's not "free". --Tbeatty 09:20, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

The Wikimedia Foundation's licensing policy must guide us as regards this matter. Please read it here. They defer the creation of an Exemption Docterine Policy to the individual projects, such as Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community has decided that images of living persons may be replaceable, and thus do not meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion of non-free content. As this policy is Wikipedia's Exemption Docterine Policy, we must delete images that do not comply. In addition deletion of an image of a living person under the argument "replaceable" doesn't mean that a free image exists, or even allegedly exists, but rather that somebody could create one. I agree there is a trade-off between legal encyclopedic content and free encyclopedic content. The decision though has been made by the Wikimedia Foundation to favour free content and this project (Wikipedia) must comply .Sancho 09:33, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

I;ve read it. Nothing preculdes inclusion of photos of living people if they meet the fair use criteria. Since this is tradeoff and no free image exists that is reliably sourced, and since very few reliably sourced images are not copyrighted, fair use is allowed. Where was the discussion that all copyrighted/fair use photos of living people should be removed? --Tbeatty 09:42, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Sancho was right in pointing you to the licensing policy resolution, but pointed you to the wrong part of it. The pertinent part is: "An EDP may not allow material where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file for the same purpose, such as is the case for almost all portraits of living notable individuals." Simple portraits of public figures like politicians are unquestionably replaceable. Go visit the Arizona State Capitol on a sitting day, or make a request for an image. --bainer (talk) 10:36, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

The "drive for free content" is not at the expense of the encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a free content encyclopedia. Many of our policies are related to that core goal. Yes we could fill up the encyclopedia will non-free replaceable images, we could also fill it up with recipes or any other number of things, but that would remove us from the goal of making a free content encyclopedia. You are right, legally we would have a very good fair use claim to use this image, but we want a free image and we could still get one as long as the person is alive and available! :) - cohesion 11:57, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Taking a picture violates WP:RS. How is that resolved? There will NEVER be a free content wikipedia because there will ALWAYS be fair use pcitures. The law does not remove copyright when someone dies. The law does not allow exceptions for hard to obtain images. But wikipedia does. Therefore, unless all fair use images are removed, this purge is arbitrary and pointless. --Tbeatty 15:09, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

True, the issue of reliable sources for pictures is not yet resolved. Second, this isn't about the legality of the pictures, it is about the drive for free content. Just because you believe it isn't possible to replace all fair-use pictures, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive to replace as many as we can, and the Foundation has decided that one way to do this is to actually not allow non-free images for which there is a reasonable expectation that a free image could be created. This purge is not arbitrary. The purge applies specifically to non-free content where we "can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file for the same purpose, such as is the case for almost all portraits of living notable individuals." This purge is not pointless. The point is to encourage upload of free material. This works. I have seen many cases where the deletion of a non-free portrait of a living person has driven somebody to acquire a free image to replace it. Sancho 15:41, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

The exception doctrine is only a guideline as well. The policy resolution does not say that photos of living persons should be deleted, rather it is a guideline. Why is the very well established guideline of Reliable Sources taking a backseat to this new deletion guideline? Reliably sourceed free content is not readily available or it would have been used. Also, Wikipedia:Verifiability is policy and random photos cannot be sourced therefore are unverifiable. --Tbeatty 22:05, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Tbeatty, we've been through this exact situation and argument many times before. As I said earlier, WP:NOR specifically notes that free, previously unpublished, original, unverifiable, un-reliably sourced images are not in violation of the proscription regarding original research; it is as simple as that. --Iamunknown 22:11, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Tbeatty, are you saying that the Foundation's resolution regarding licensing policy is to be treated as mere guideline? Right at the top of that page, it says This policy may not be circumvented, eroded, or ignored on local Wikimedia projects.. In that same resolution, it also states An EDP may not allow material where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file for the same purpose, such as is the case for almost all portraits of living notable individuals.. Sancho 22:22, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

No, the foundation resolution is policy. Deleting images of living people in the misguided attempt to comply is not policy. The EDP is what governs Wikipedia in its implementation and that is a guideline (it says so right at the top of the page). Only the transcluded section is policy and nothing more. Read the policy and you will see nothing regarding images of living people. --Tbeatty 00:24, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

This is because WP:NFCC does not go into specific examples of specific cases. However, WP:NONFREE#Examples of acceptable use and WP:NONFREE#Examples of unacceptable use are extrapolated from the criteria. Replaceable photos of living people are encapsulated in criterion 1. howcheng {chat} 00:31, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

The examples are guidelines, not policy. They are invented interpretations. The goal is free/libre everything. The reality is the policy recognizes that this is not always possible. This current witchhunt is a misguided interpretation of policy. Keep the goal, stop the insanity deletion process that is out of control. It doesn't improve peoples access to information and it doesn't make information freer. --Tbeatty 07:10, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Here's the simple test on WP:NFCC "Can this image be replaced by a different one, while still having the same effect?" If the answer is yes, the replace it. But if it doesn't yet exist, it doesn't need to be deleted. There is no policy reason to delete an image if a free one does not yet exist. By all means, go out and create one and upload it and replace it. Stop deleting it. It doesn't help. --Tbeatty 07:15, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Tbeatty, then how do you suggest that Wikipedia comply with the requirement to "not allow material where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file for the same purpose, such as is the case for almost all portraits of living notable individuals", without requiring deletion of such material? Not being allowed to allow the material means to me that we must delete it. Anything else would be allowing the material. Sancho 00:34, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I suggest that instead of having the army deleting legitmate fair use photos, they actually spend that time finding or creating the free images and replacing them. It takes no effort to delete thousands of photos and does nothing create the sum of all human knowledge. Leave the non-free, fair use image until the free one is created. If this group spent as much time creating free content as it did deleting fair use content, we wouldn't have a problem. --Tbeatty 04:33, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

How does that have us comply with the requirement to "not allow material where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file for the same purpose, such as is the case for almost all portraits of living notable individuals"? Leaving the material in the project isn't not allowing it.Sancho 08:17, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

We have to be careful to distinguish Wikimedia resolutions and directives from Wikipedia policy. The Foundation told us to make an EDP and we did it. As Wikipedians we listened to them and created an EDP policy that we think complies. It's up to us to follow the EDP, not the resolution. If we think the EDP and guidelines are out of sync with the resolution we need to change those, but it is not up to every Wikipedian to go out and make up interpretations on his own on a claim he is on a mission from the Foundation. If we allow every editor to interpret Wikimedia directives on his own, Wikipedia policy and consensus be damned, we get a chaotic result where people who have differences of opinion simply say they are right, without any basis for resolving the disagreement. Wikidemo 01:43, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't suppose a policy page could be made that states that? Because that's exactly what happened [7] [8] a couple of months ago. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 02:41, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Note also that it's further clarified in the following sentence to some extent: "Any content used under an EDP must be replaced with a freely licensed work whenever one is available which will serve the same educational purpose." This would appear, if I'm looking at it correctly, to allow some reasonably gradual transition into using images in the public domain as soon as they become availiable for each particular use. It's also somewhat further clarified, as to EDPs in general, in the sentence after that, which reads: "Media used under EDPs are subject to deletion if they lack an applicable rationale." This, in turn, is followed by a sentence that perhaps should be clarified by someone on the Board (if it hasn't already been clarified), which is: "They must be used only in the context of other freely licensed content." ... Kenosis 22:45, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Haven't we been over this before, like less than a month ago (with Mosquera (talk · contribs))? Wikipedia:No original research#Original images specifically notes that free, previously unpublished images are not in violation of NOR (or, at least, their violation is permitted ;)), because they generally do not publish original ideas. Of course, that does not address your original concern of RS, but NOR is a policy and RS a guideline. --Iamunknown 16:04, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

I believe his point 5 still stands, what about that? sephia karta 15:48, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

That should be a separate discussion. We can't allow non-free portraits of living people. We can allow screenshots since no free equivalent could ever be created. But we don't have t o include screenshots. That would be the only change that would fix the apparent discrepancy described in point 5. What do you think? If we're going to change topics to whether or not screenshots should be allowed, we really should start a new section though. Sancho 15:55, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Sancho, thank you for calling the board resolution to our attention. ([9] ) On this particular issue of photographs of living persons, although it may be a lot of extra work in many instances and leave unnecessary gaps in BLPs, it appears this is indeed the policy of the Board of Trustees as you have stated. ... Kenosis 16:21, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

There's not a contradiction with the screenshots issue. Screenshots should not be used to illustrate living persons; their only generally appropriate use is, when justified, to illustrate the episode or show or movie they represent. (ESkog)^(Talk) 16:43, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

I strongly agree that the policy on fair use images is corrupted. It is both illogical and difficult to obtain photographs of certain people, regardless of how often they are seen in public. [[User:Rhythmnation2004 Rhythmnation2004]] 17:21, 30 July 2007 (UTC).

It may be difficult to work with, but the Foundation's resolution is pretty clear on this one and it's not negotiable. Wikipedia has reached a point where there is a substantial contributor base, especially on the English-language edition. We don't need to rely on other people to give us images of things we could go get for ourselevs. (ESkog)^(Talk) 17:29, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

That may be true, but it seems an awful waste of time to go get images of things that people are giving away for free. I think one of the concerns here probably is, why mobilize an army of amateur photographers to go re-capture things like official state government photos that are, for all intents and purposes, free, if not entirely "free" under the radical definition of "freedomdefined." It just seems like a huge, huge waste of time to re-shoot, say, photos of Washington state legislators, when photographers could be shooting things for which no photo exists, and doing the only kind of original research/content creation that Wikipedia actually supports. And, of course, deleting these next-to-free state government photos because a "freer" one could exist shoots the whole "encyclopedia" mission right in the foot, at the expense of the "free" mission, which many see as an unbalanced prioritization of "free" over "encyclopedia". One would think that you'd actually have to prove a "freer" version exists in the first place, say, by uploading it, and THEN deleting the less-free version... but, hey, what are you going to do? Jenolen ^{speak it!} 17:46, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

It certainly is difficult. We're building the world's largest, free encyclopedia. This won't happen quickly, and it won't happen without a lot of effort by everyone involved. We won't be done tomorrow. We might never be done. Nobody ever said this would be easy.Sancho 17:39, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

It is difficult, but definitely possible. See User:Videmus Omnia/Free Images, my own small collection, commons:Category:Balkenende IV and many other examples. Garion96 (talk) 19:40, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

I going to make a statement that should help those who dont like the policy. The Images that the US government releases are not free as in libre, there are some restrictions on the use, If I lived in AZ I would get you a photograph. Getting such images isnt that hard, it just takes some time and effort. Because the goal of Wikimedia is to provide free content that can be re-used without licensing issues. Yes its easier to use the copyrighted non-free version that senators release for the media to use, but because part of our m:Mission is to provide material that is free (as in libre). ^∆ 19:22, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

US Government (as in federal government) images cannot be copyrighted by law, so they are immediately public-domain. On the other hand, states and cities may legally hold copyrights, and could choose to release their work under terms ranging from "all rights reserved" to "anything goes" (most fall somewhere in between, but most state/locality terms of use fall short of free content). As to Jenolen above, the misconception there is common, but is a misconception. We cannot have a nonfree image if it is replaceable by a free image. That doesn't mean that it has been replaced, only if there's a reasonable means by which it could be. In the case of a living person, existing structure, etc., the image is replaceable by, well, snapping a picture! In this case, disallowing the nonfree images provides a greater impetus to people to snap their own pictures, seek a license release under a free license from the person or uploaders to Flickr and the like, and taking steps to get a free image. If something nonfree is already there, and is likely to be allowed to remain indefinitely, that impetus is no longer there. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:32, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Non-rationale

I think that the "It is believed that the use of low resolution images of ..... qualifies as fair use" does more harm than good - it seems unnecessary if a specific fair use rationale _is_ provided, and it seems to encourage not providing one - because it contains such legalese, the tag may be confused with a rationale, and new users will think "well, i _did_ put a rationale, it's right there!" etc. --Random832 22:00, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

I think you've got a good point there. Perhaps replacing it with something clearer to new users might be more beneficial? I'd suggest "This image will be deleted if it is not used in any articles, if the image description page does not clearly state the source and copyright holder of the image, or if a detailed fair use rationale is not provided stating why this image is legal to use under fair use and acceptable for use according to our nonfree image policy." I hadn't looked closely at those templates, but the current wording is very confusing. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 22:59, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, but please remember to call it a "use rationale" or a "non-free use rationale" to avoid confusion. Also clarify that the rationale is to state why the image is acceptable for Wikipedia non-free use policy, not to argue why it is legal as fair use. As we've been talking about, Wikipedia has non-free use standards that are based on but are much narrower than fair use legal requirements. To make that clear we have been trying to get away from calling it a "fair use rationale", using "non-free use rationale" instead. We had better be consistent so as not to confuse people with different terms for the same thing. Wikidemo 01:36, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

You've got a good point there as well. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 17:39, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

speedy deletion criteria

Currently, a nonfree image of a living person can stay up for 48 hours after having been tagged for deletion if it is tagged as screenshot fair use, cover album fair use, or magazine fair use (even when it is clearly not being used in accordance with the tag). It seems to me that this is unnecessarily long. (I'm not sure if this has been proposed before. If it has, please point me to prior discussion.) Maybe only 1 in 1000 nonfree images of living people can be justified under WP:NFCC because their subjects are hermits (or similar). It seems to be no big loss to be able to delete copyrighted images quickly and then later reupload that rare case if necessary. On some pages like model articles, nonfree images are uploaded rather frequently. If we have to wait 48 hours to delete each one, there is a significant portion of the time that some nonfree image is up on the page. Calliopejen1 06:45, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Legitmate fair use images should not be deleted until a free replacement is created/available. --Tbeatty 07:18, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

What's the rush? Any copyright violation can be removed immediately. If it merely runs afoul of the non-free use rules but it's legal, the image is only hurting the project's long term goals and there is no emergency. Two days is already a very short time to sort things out, especially for older images where the original editor may be long gone. It isn't obvious to me that only 1 out of 1,000 images of living people currently on Wikipedia should be there. There are about 300,000 non-free images overall and perhaps 15,000 of living people. Are you saying only 15 belong? It can be hard to find missing images, especially if you're not the one who uploaded them in the first place.

If you are actively editing the article, can't you make an editorial decision (as opposed to an image deletion decision) to remove or replace an image, without any notice? That's what I would do if it were on an article I was actively working on. Wikidemo 09:21, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

On second thought, perhaps I have been misinformed about the policy. Maybe someone could clarify this before I get into more details--is tagging a Vogue cover with a model on it (when it's used in the model's infobox to show what she looks like) an image w/ a "clearly invalid fair use tag" that can be speedily deleted? I had been told by an admin not to tag these for sd, but maybe this is wrong. A general note about why I'm asking this: I agree that I could just remove the image from the article. However, certain images we do just delete outright--a copyrighted image with no fair use claim. I just don't see the difference between that sort of copyrighted image and a copyrighted image with a fair use tag that's been misapplied. Calliopejen1 09:38, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

The "clearly invalid fair use tag" stuff is more geared towards stuff like photos of frogs tagged as non-free currency (an actual real example I came across a little while back), or a photo of a guy in a mascot suit tagged with the logo template and things like that. So a magazine cover showing a living person tagged with the magazine cover tag is just fine. Naturaly if that cover happens to be used only to depict a living person then that would be a invalid use of that image per the policy (it would be replacable because a free licensed image could be created to do the same job). The same image might see valid use in some other article though (about the magazine for example), in wich case it should obviously not be delted but simply removed from the article(s) where using it was not ok. --Sherool (talk) 15:37, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Stencils

Ok, I know this scrapes the bottom of the barrel of the endless examples and discussions concerning every little possible case of strange fair use, but what about stencils? I've recently had a problem with the fair use of this image. Specifically, I'm not sure how to tag it most appropriately. On one hand it is a logo (fair use). On the other hand it is a stencil meant to be used to create original artwork (free - or at least the derivate artwork would be free). Say, for instance, I wanted to use that logo in a template (which I do). Fair Use images are not allowed on templates - fair enough. But what if I created my own media using the logo (as it was intended to be used) and tagged it as an original piece, complete with GFDL permission. Furthermore, how "original" would this original creation have to be? (If for example I used the stencil to create a black matte version of the logo, effectively making it identical to the stencil image. Or if there's an ever so-slight difference between the stencil image and my new artwork: a few pixels, a few degrees grayer, etc). I know this is a strange question, and I don't know if it will ever be applicable to any image ever again, but I hoped you guys might have some ideas. Thanks. Drewcifer3000 04:41, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

A few points:

1. There's nothing to indicate that the work is under any free licence. The most that you can draw from the stencil being available for download is an implied licence granting downloaders rights to personal use of the stencil.
2. If you incorporate a copyrighted work into a piece of your own work, you can't validly release that second piece of work under a free licence (like the GFDL), because you're not the only copyright holder involved. The resulting work is a derivative of both your work and someone else's.

The effect is that what you're suggesting is not possible. --bainer (talk) 05:06, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

OK, good points. Thanks for the advice. Drewcifer3000 11:28, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Historic versus non-historic images

What is the distinction that should be drawn between historic and non-historic non-free pictures? At what point does a photograph become notable in its own right? Examples are in Category:Photographs and Category:Non-free historic images. So how should people make the decision over whether to put {{Non-free historic image}} on an image? Where is the borderline drawn between historic images and non-historic images? Carcharoth 12:48, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Historic images should be those that are historic in and of themselves, not just old. The images should have significant commentary and have been influential in some way. Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is the epitome of this. howcheng {chat} 16:38, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Exactly. Image:Louis R. Lowerys Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.JPG, since it is free, is the one to use for an article about the battle (and it is the one used in Battle of Iwo Jima), and the copyrighted historic picture is used under fair-use in an article about the photograph. The other classic example is Che Guevara (photo). For free images, the classic example of a famous free photograph is The Blue Marble. Carcharoth 16:47, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

PS. I realise you were probably speaking to the crowd with your "not just old" comment, but in case there was any confusion, the adjective for history is historical, while historic (the word we have both correctly been using) implies notability. By "at what point" I meant "at what point does a photograph become notable", not "when does an old photo become historical". Carcharoth 16:51, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Not to sound flippant, but a photograph becomes notable when the world at large decides it does. A notable photograph will have articles written about it, or will be mentioned in books as having impact or whatever. As to "at what point", it may be a number of years before a photo's impact can be assessed, or it may have an immediate impact; it just depends on the photo itself. howcheng {chat} 16:59, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

So that is the standard for having an article about a photograph, and I agree with that. What then is the standard for putting {{Non-free historic image}} on a non-free photograph? That seems more tricky to me. The template says (among other things): "The Image depicts a non-reproducible historic event, and no free alternative exists or can be created" - that would seem to apply to the Einstein TIME cover picture to me, the TIME person of the century event being no more or less historic and non-reproducible than many of the other pictures in Category:Non-free historic images (over 1000 pictures). Carcharoth 17:08, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

You can take that wording and apply it to any photograph of any event in history. I don't know if it really needs changing though because the policy overrides the template language. I only worry that other editors are thinking that any historical photograph can be used because of the wording. Perhaps that is a conversation better suited for the template talk page, however. howcheng {chat} 18:35, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

And this is what I meant above about one of the dangers of using templates for licencses - or at least using transcluded ones rather than substituted ones. If you change the template wording from "historic event" to "notable historical event" because you are worried that people may be interpreting historic to mean any historical photo (and I think such misinterpretation might be common), then you change the wording on the licence tags for over a thousand pictures - the original uploader was not using that wording. One course of action is to create a new "historic" template tag and migrate the current 1000 images from the old tag to the new one. Which kinds of defeats the purpose of templates. I agree that it is probably best to leave the template as it is, and to look through the category for inappropriate uses of the tag. I picked one at random and found Image:Belfast City Hall - Under Construction.jpg - which has an additional copyright tag, presumably pertaining to the building. Can this copyright still hold if the building is covered in scaffolding and not yet fully built! Another example picked at random is Image:19450715 Buchenwald survivors arrive in Haifa.jpg - like the previous one, that is clearly a unique moment (it is not possible to go back to the location and take a photo). Two of the uses of this photo are fine (in Aliyah and Berihah). The use in Flag of Israel is questionable, as it is used in a photo gallery and there is no discussion of this particular photo and its significance. Image:Fred Perry Forehand.jpg is a good example of an image with accompanying commentary - the caption refers to Perry's famous "snapped forehand" shot (seen in the picture). But the worrying thing is that many of these perfectly OK pictures don't have fair-use rationales. It would be a tragedy if they were deleted through over-zealousness. Carcharoth 20:40, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

A photo that is historic in its own right is suitable for inclusion in the same way as any art work. The test is notability, and the use is appropriate in an article about the photo, or an article about a related subject where the photo is sufficiently discussed and relevant to the article. Significance is inherent. You can't talk fully about a work of visual art without showing the work of visual art. By contrast, an irreplaceable but non-notable copyrighted photo of a historic event is also suitable, but there is the added layer of significance, criterion 8. It is not inherently significant that the historical event be illustrated. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on the event and how the article is written. There is also widespread and legitimate debate over the role of visual representations in serving the educational purpose of Wikipedia. A few people go to the extreme and dismiss all visuals used for illustrative purposes as merely "decorative" or "merely showing what something looks like", a coined term they use as a shorthand for without encyclopedic purpose. The broader mainstream understanding, I believe, is that images are often communicative and illustrations useful. But you get that debate a lot. Wikidemo 20:06, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Child, adult, old age pictures

I raised this above, but it got lost in the noise. Let's say we had three pictures of Einstein (or any person). One as a child, one as a middle-aged man, and one as an old man. And only one is a free picture. If the fair-use reasons for using the other two are strong enough, then can all three be used in the article on Einstein? For living people, where pics are replaceable, yes, I can understand that, but what happens when you have non-free pictures of them as a child, and as an adult, and the only free picture you can obtain of them now is of them in old age? Carcharoth 12:48, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Even for living people this raises an interesting question. Sure, we can take picture of former child actors now, but what about pictures of them from when they were children? Ben Hocking ^{(talk|contribs)} 13:39, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I'd say that is a clear-cut case of fair-use. Possibly restricted to a "childhood" or "career" section, but maybe justified as being the main image if that is what they are famous for and their career as a child actor is what they are known for. But I'd like as many views as possible from people here. Carcharoth 13:48, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I would say only if their appearance as a child is important to the article... like if they would be recognized in films and such due to their appearance in them at young ages. But if they were "just a kid" and nobody would need to know what they looked like as a kid to recognize the subject in any of their notable achievements. So, I would argue that a non-free image of Kelly Clarkson at age eleven would not be acceptable, but a non-free image of Macaulay Culkin would be acceptable. Coincidentally, somebody tracked down a free image of Macaulay Culkin at that age for the article :-). Sancho 16:17, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Agree with Sancho here. Non-free images of people at other ages are only necessary when the appearance is notable, not just because they appeared younger back then or whatever. howcheng {chat} 16:37, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Another similar (over-lapping) category are actors whose careers have spanned many decades. Mickey Rooney and Sean Connery come to mind as two actors who look quite different in earlier appearances than they do now. Incidentally, Mickey Rooney was also a child actor (he was only 7 when he appeared in "Orchids and Ermine"), and there are no pictures of him from that time period. Similarly, I see no pictures of a younger Sean Connery on his page. Ben Hocking ^{(talk|contribs)} 16:40, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

A related question concerns models, certain entertainers, and others who are (i) notable for their professions, (ii) where the visual expression is part of their profession, and (iii) they no longer perform the same act or they do not appear professionally before the public in circumstances where a fair-use picture can be created. You could argue, in the case of a typical singer for instance, that you can catch them at a public appearance or stalk them paparazzi style to get a free image. Or if their performance is important, an audience member could take a bootleg picture. But a glamor model probably does not appear in public wearing model make-up and couture clothes. You might have to go to extraordinary (and illegal) lengths to get a picture of a Las Vegas magic show. The free image of Penn_and_teller at the Emmy Awards, for example, is not very helpful to illustrate their career. A non-free image of their performance, instead of or in addition to the free image, would add substantially to the article's encyclopedic purpose. Many articles are becoming less relevant and less useful in this way, as good non-free images are replaced by less relevant free ones. Wikidemo 20:19, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Can a single free picture replace all other pictures?

I sometimes see people saying that once a free image has been found, all non-free images should be removed from an article. I would like to ask people here to reject or confirm this. In my view, the case for each non-free image still needs to be examined on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes, especially for historical subjects still being depicted in modern media and culture, there is a strong case for fair-use of non-free images in sections of an article. For example, modern depictions of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar respectively. It is most certainly not a case of "chuck out all other pics once a free pic is available". For example, the child, adult, old age example I give above, or an image of a scientist working in a laboratory around the time of his greatest achievements, as opposed to a picture of him now, snapped from a distance by some student at university. What are people's opinions on all this? Carcharoth 12:48, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

• It is, of course, a case by case basis. Andy Warhol has a free picture of him, but still requires un unfree image of a soup can to have any chance of being an encyclopaedic article. Michael Jordan has several free images, but still has a very reasonable screencap from SpaceJam - Michael Dorn has a free image of him, but a very justifiable nonfree image of him on ST:TNG. A free image of Phan Thị Kim Phúc would have no hope of justifying the removal of the unfree image there, and the free images of Che Guevara don't eliminate an encyclopaedic need for the iconic representation of him. WilyD 13:31, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
  • Thanks for that. You've confirmed my thoughts on the matter. This is one thing that those policing fair-use must be conscious of. If an editor, in good faith, has thought long and hard about the need for fair-use images, and aimed for the delicate balance between depicting iconic and key moments, and also using free pictures where available, then they should respect that balance and be diplomatic. The Einstein picture for TIME person of the century being a case in point. I said "needed to illustrate TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century. The use in other articles should be debated on the talk page of the image, but a [use] in Einstein's honours section seems reasonable." Some people in that debate were saying things like "free images (with expired copyright) of Einstein are already available. That makes the image not only replaceable by a free image, but indeed already replaced" - the point was that none of those free images could show the reader the historic image of Einstein on TIME magazine as person of the century. In other words the availability of free images does not reduce the strength of a fair use argument. Apples and oranges. Elsewhere on that IfD page, another editor said (of a picture of Hitler): "we just need 1 image of him to throw out all other images that don't add more noteworthy information than showing what he looked like" - again, I take the strongest exception to that. If a fair-use rationale for an image of a person is widely accepted, the presence of free images of that same person should not be thought to diminish or weaken the fair-use rationale. Carcharoth 13:59, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    • The presence of a free image doesn't have any bearing. If the purpose of having the non-free image could have been accomplished by a free image, then the non-free image shouldn't have been there to start with. Jheald 14:37, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    • It's all about what are the images being used for. We don't use non-free content for purposes we could achieve with free content. Once we have a free image to show what a person looks like, we can't use a non-free image to show what that person looks like.
    • An image of a "scientist working in a laboratory around the time of his greatest achievements" will hardly be necessary for the understanding of a discussion about the his greatest achievements, and can only be used if the image is free. --Abu badali ^(talk) 14:40, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
    • There are a few exceptions. Generally, if no nonfree photos exist, and non can be created, then we allow non-free ones instead. But if later exist photos come to be licensed freely (either by copyright expiration or because a copyright owner releases an image under a free license) then things may change. But generally, Jheald's point is usually the case - free images and non-free images don't actively interact - non-free images should be unreplaceable by free images. WilyD 14:51, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
      • I can see Carcharoth's point in some cases (Kim Phuc certainly being a good example, and that's one of the rare cases where a nonfree image of a still-living person is acceptable and irreplaceable, due to its iconic status and historic significance.) But I'm not convinced, in the case of Einstein, that the cover itself is in and of itself (rather than in context of what it represents) historically significant, nor that the point it conveys can't be conveyed adequately by text ("Albert Einstein was called Time Magazine's Person of the Century.") Certainly, we wouldn't have a scan of every page of the magazine to illustrate the #2-#100 runners-up, we don't generally have photos of magazine covers if we're citing their cover story as a source. In many cases, nonfree images are adequately replaceable by no image at all, the text itself will get the point across just fine. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 16:16, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
        • Actually, the picture of Albert Einstein has a stronger claim for use in the "honours" section of his article, because it is not merely illustrating his being awarded that honour, but it is illustrating the concept of Einstein being honoured. Let's pick another example. Would it be possible to use Image:Einstein Memorial.jpg instead, in the "honours" section of Einstein's article? The copyright there pertains to the sculptor, but how does that apply to statues on public display? Carcharoth 16:39, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
          • Something there, maybe, but I guess I still fail to see why nonfree content is required to get across the point that Einstein has received a huge array of honors, both during his life and after. (Didn't what I just said convey that?) One picture wouldn't convey the types and varieties thereof, and tons of pictures would be pretty excessive, so I would think just stating some of the biggest ones he's received would probably be the best way. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:09, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
            • The point is not to get across that Einstein has many honors but that he is Time's Man of the Century. That is a singular and important award that elevates him, in some mass market / pop culture news sense at least, to the status of most important person of the past 100 years. The educational/encyclopedic value of illustrating that with an image of the cover - which is the embodiment of the award - is far more important than any implication that the image of the cover makes Wikipedia less free, a far-fetched concern at best. Wikidemo 21:34, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
              • Actually, from an encyclopedic point of view Image:Max-Planck-und-Albert-Einstein.jpg would have been better, but someone saw it on the Corbis website and thought our use of it would infringe their ability to sell the picture. This is patently false. Corbis sell the Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima picture (seriously, search for it on their website), and we don't delete that picture because of that. I think I need to start a new section on this. Carcharoth 22:09, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
              • Funny that you would take this position. I thought we had strong consensus on implementing the current version of criterion 8, a discussion in which you participated. Words can clearly communicate the concept, so a non-free image is not called for here. howcheng {chat} 22:49, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I just want to respond down here to what Jheald said above: "The presence of a free image doesn't have any bearing. If the purpose of having the non-free image could have been accomplished by a free image, then the non-free image shouldn't have been there to start with" - that is a very good point (with the exceptions pointed out for expired copyright, releases of previously non-free images, and discovery of previously unknown free images). Can I ask if the corollary also holds? ie. "The presence of a free image doesn't have any bearing. If the purpose of having the non-free image cannot be accomplished by a free image, then the non-free image shouldn't be removed"? What I fear is over-zealous application of a 'free content' philosophy leading to misunderstanding of this point, ending with a "let's find a free image to replace this non-free image regardless of the specific rationale for the non-free use" mindset. The correct mindset should be either "we have a free image! wonderful, let's find an article to use it in, where it can either complement, or (if it serves the same purpose) replace the existing non-free images", or "this image can only be used under fair-use - let's carefully consider whether we are justified in using it in any articles, or whether a free replacement is available". Note replacement - not a free image of something vaguely related but that doesn't do the same job as the non-free image. If neither option is available, then there is no image. Carcharoth 21:56, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

No argument here. The inclusion of a non-free image should be done for a specific purpose, to make clear something in the text that could not be understood as well without it (the major reasoning behind criterion 8). But if the non-free image is there just because it's related in a more-or-less tangential manner, then it's totally unnecessary and having no image is better. Likewise when words alone can accomplish the same task. howcheng {chat} 23:08, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Some on here may be interested...

http://defendfairuse.org/ ↔NMajdan•talk 20:22, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Changing criteria 1

I'm posting this here due to Tbeatty's arguments on the administrator's noticeboard, his/her arguments above a few comments, and his/her comments directly above. I would like to clarify from the community whether or not there is consensus for the current state of the EDP (this policy) with respect to the deletion of portraits of living persons. Currently, criteria 1 requires that:

"Non-free content is used only where no free equivalent is available or could be created that would serve the same encyclopedic purpose."

I believe Tbeatty is requesting that we remove the or could be created clause so as to require the free equivalent actually exist at the time of the deletion of the non-free content from Wikipedia. Is there consensus for this change? (Also, TBeatty, if I have misrepresented your request, please correct me...) My opinion is that this policy wouldn't comply with the foundation's resolution on licensing policies if we remove this clause. Sancho 08:37, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

You're correct, such a change would not be compatible with the Foundations' licensing policy. Individual projects are free to develop their own policies on non-free content, but only so long as they are as restrictive or more restrictive than the requirements of the policy, not less restrictive. Tbeatty, I'm afraid you're wasting your time trying to change things here, you need to be speaking to the Foundation (though I have to say, you'll probably still be wasting your time if you do that). --bainer (talk) 09:06, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps he is advocating for a change in the resolution. It is hard to know. According to the resolution our policy should prohibit non-free images where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file for the same purpose... Any content ... must be replaced with a freely licensed work whenever one is available which will serve the same educational purpose. The policy as it now stands prohibits images where free equivalent is available or could be created that would serve the same encyclopedic purpose...Non-free content is always replaced with a freer alternative if one of acceptable quality is available. "Acceptable quality" means a quality sufficient to serve the encyclopedic purpose.

Our policy can't be any more permissive of non-free images than the resolution but we can be less permissive if we want. There is some confusion because you could read our policy to permit things the resolution does not, or conversely to be more restrictive. It is hard to know how "we can reasonably expect someone to upload" meshes up with "is available or could be created", so people have to keep referring back to the resolution to figure out what our policy means. I would favor our adopting the exact language of the resolution as a starting point, then saing exactly how and where we mean to be more restrictive than the resolution, if at all. Things like the "ask yourself" suggestion and the definition of "acceptable" ought to move to the guidelines, especially if we are simply trying to explain things in greater detail but don't mean to diverge from the resolution. Wikidemo 09:16, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't think we have to remove the phrase as there is nothing actionable in the phrase. It has been interpreted overzealously as actionable when it is really just a goal statement. Let's look at it:

• Non-free content is used only where no free equivalent is available or could be created that would serve the same encyclopedic purpose."

This isn't a direction for deletion. It is a statement of a goal. It's passive voice. Interpreting this to be "Delete non-free content when a free equivalent could be created" is an overzealous interpretation. When the policy describes how the goal is to be achieved, all of the actionable statements use the term "replace" not "delete". The goal statement is a call to create free replacements, not delete non-free existing images. --Tbeatty 14:10, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

What about the section on Wikipedia:Non-free_content#Non-compliance: An image that does not comply with this policy 48 hours after notification to the uploading editor will be deleted.

Fair-use images are not in disagreement with that section. Fair-use images of living people comply with all 10 points. --Tbeatty 20:49, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Is it this part that you disagree with? I think this has been included in order to have our policy comply with the resolution statement: "As of March 23, 2007, all new media uploaded under unacceptable licenses (as defined above) and lacking an exemption rationale should be deleted, and existing media under such licenses should go through a discussion process where it is determined whether such a rationale exists; if not, they should be deleted as well." The 2-7 day delay allows for the discussion process on the image's talk page. Sancho 14:51, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

All of those sections are guidleines and have been misinterpreted as saying that fair use images should be deleted without a replacement. That is simply incorrect. --Tbeatty 20:49, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I would like to point out that the phrase "... or could be created ... ", taken by itself, has the net effect of immediately wiping out the overwhelming majority of legitimate fair-use content if it's not taken in context with the remainder of the "non-free" criteria. This is, as Wikidemo pointed out, set in the context of the Board's directive that WP should prohibit non-free images where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file for the same purpose... Any content ... must be replaced with a freely licensed work whenever one is available which will serve the same educational purpose. Except, of course, the phrase at issue refers to NFC/EDP as a whole. Perhaps it would be worth considering another way of phrasing this in WP:NFC, such as, e.g., " ... or could reasonably be created without undue hardship ... ", " ... or could be created without unreasonable hardship ... ", or some other agreeable way of expressing the overall concept consistently with the Board's instructions, without hitting it with a sledgehammer right at the outset. ... Kenosis 14:32, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Or mayber we just stop deleting them until the free ones are created which is what was intended. --Tbeatty 20:49, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

"Without undue hardship"? We could call it the lazy clause. I suppose we should start allowing people to upload articles copied from elsewhere if it would be too hard to write an article on the subject. --bainer (talk) 14:40, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Actually we do that when there isn't a copyright problem including the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica. --Tbeatty 20:49, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Actually "undue hardship" is a fairly standard legal term of art. Most reasonable persons would likely agree that to demand, for instance, that people immediately go to various parts of the world with their cameras snapping photos of notable persons and promptly upload them creates an unreasonable hardship (an "undue hardship") if it needs to be done, say, this week or this month. ... Kenosis 14:47, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

"Undue hardship" doesn't apply, because no one's being forced to do anything. It's not as if the foundation is saying "You, Quadell, must provide this free image!". Instead, they're saying "We won't accept an image that doesn't fit these criteria. If no image fits these criteria, that's fine too." It's only undue hardship if you feel that you are compelled to provide an image for a specific purpose no matter what. If you are so compelled, it's not the foundation compelling you. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 14:56, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Hey look. I gave a couple of examples in support of the notion that there are other ways of expressing the concept that are potentially more consistent with what's being advocated. Rather than discussing both, I see a hint of the same "laziness" that's being lambasted above right here and now. How about actually considering what the alternatives are. Thanks. ... Kenosis 15:00, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I think I understand what you've proposed, but I think that the inclusion of the phrase "without undue hardship" won't actually prevent any removals of non-free content since the replacement of the non-free content never puts undue or any hardship on anyone other than certainly the time to take the picture and to upload it. Also (for everyone), I split off this section so that we could stay focussed on specific changes to the wording of this policy, so let's keep away from the "lazyness" etc. words that might distract from the discussion, and thanks Kenosis for making a suggestion for a specific change. Sancho 15:17, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Sure, fair enough. So how about the phrase " ... or could be created without unreasonable hardship ... " or another way of expressing it so the the implications of "could be created" aren't so easily hyperbolized to include every possible scenario wherein something theoretically "could be created"? The language "could be created" isn't written in stone, and has some clearly identifiable drawbacks when applied to NFC/EDP as a whole. Thanks very much for the willingness to consider the alternatives. ... Kenosis 15:24, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

You mean something that better reflects the resolution's idea of a reasonable expectation that someone be able to upload a freely licensed file for the same purpose? I guess the current policy statement takes the Foundation's statement "reasonable expectation" to mean "is available or could be created". We would need to find a wording that would prevent the deleter from always being able to argue something like "it wouldn't be unreasonable hardship for the right person to create a free alternative". Also, I should also disclose my personal disagreement with a move away from deleting material that has the potential for a free replacement, even if that replacement is a long time coming. I really believe that not allowing non-free content when a free replacement may be created (no matter how hard it may be to create the free replacement, as long as it's not too close to impossible) promotes the creation of free material and that the temporary harm to the encyclopedia is worth it if we get a better, freer encyclopedia in the long run. So, as I'm trying to anticipate reasonable objections to your suggested changes, I'm also probably tainted a bit by my belief that the current principle is the correct one. Sancho 15:50, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

WRT "We would need to find a wording that would prevent the deleter from always being able to argue something like "it wouldn't be unreasonable hardship for the right person to create a free alternative"." I'm not advocating for a particular wording at the moment, but stating it, as the Board has, in terms of, e.g. "reasonably expect" or other similar expression. Far from being a blanket license to argue "wouldn't be unreasonable" in every instance, such an approach can quite readily be clarified over time with some illustrative examples guiding users as to what's consensused to be reasonable and what's not. Just for sake of argument here, it might be illustrated to be "unreasonable" to expect a public-domain map of a college campus to be created and released tomorrow, or for some as-yet-unidentified person in Wyoming or New York to immediately photograph a particular notable person whose self-published but technically "non-free" website PR photo is still presently being used, release the new photograph into the public domain and immediately upload it merely because it "could be created" in this fashion. These kinds of arguments already occur wikiwide, and part of the present debates and arguments about images and other NFC surround the notion of "could be created". A clearer introductory expression of the intent of the Board's directive and the WP interpretation of the Board's directive would, I admit, create a new aspect or a slightly changed aspect of debate and argument about the rationales given to post images as well as reasons given in support of deleting such images. A clarification of the phrase "could be created" would, I imagine, help to eliminate at least some of the widespread cognitive confusion about what this language intends to mean. We already know from looking at the 10 NFC criteria and other interpretations that "could be created" has a particular set of meanings that may vary depending on type of content, copyright status, and stated rationale for fair-use. So I'm advocating consideration of a clarification of "could be created" that more accurately reflects the actual set of policies that the reader of WP:NFC encounters when they read further or when they look at the actual Board resolution. IMO, the use of "can reasonably be created" or some similar way of putting it, more accurately refects the content of WP:NFC as well as the overall intent of the Board wrt NFC/EDP. ... Kenosis 16:23, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

There are clarifying details in the examples of acceptable and unacceptable uses. The Foundation resolution only gave us one example (the portraits of living individuals), but we've come up with many more specific examples in these sections. Perhaps the discussion concerning whether or not these uses were acceptable did cover whether or not the replacement/creation could be reasonably expected. I'm not familiar with how the discussion behind all of these examples, but they seem to be along the line of what you're advocating. Sancho 17:56, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

(indent reset) Quadell is quite right. There is no "undue hardship" on anyone, because no given editor is going to be forced to provide the image. I can't tell you "Hey, catch the next flight to Paris, you're going to be taking a picture of this!" (And if I do, you can tell me where to stuff it.) Rather, we can simply wait for a Parisian editor, or one who happens to be visiting there, to provide one, or for a free-release permission request to be successful. In the meantime, the article will survive without an image, and indeed, if the article cries out for an image, that lack will be a spur to editors to either take a picture and release it if they have the chance, or to look through Flickr and start requesting free-release permission if they don't. We've already gotten a lot more free images of living people since we said "Free image or no image", for exactly that reason—if something is already there and is likely to be allowed indefinitely, no one tends to do the work of getting a free image, but if "free image" is a non-negotiable prerequisite, they'll actually bother to put in a release request and often succeed. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 17:50, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

So istead of deleting the image and putting up tags, why don't the people who want all free content put out release requests instead? This would be a way more productive use of their time and then they can replace the image instead of deleting it. --Tbeatty 22:46, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

No one here argued that anything is necessarily an "undue hardship", but rather, I merely presented it as one of two hypothetical examples, clarified as "or other agreeable way of expressing the overall concept" that might more accurately reflect the content of the rest of WP:NFC. Yet, three users thus far have chosen to harp on the notion of "undue hardship" rather than attempt to deal with alternatives that might more accurately convey the expectations of the Board and the content of WP:NFC. The first mocked it in the context of being a proposed "lazy clause", Upon my clarification of what the term "undue hardship" is (a standard legal term of art) the second response above argued, using an extremely hyperbolic example, that it doesn't apply here, possibly having taken a cue from the first to mock the situation. Now, after moving onto a more direct discussion with Sancho about other possible ways of expressing the phrase "could be created" that might arguably reflect the Board's resolution more accurately (specifically the Board's use of the word "reasonable" or "reasonably"), evidently the next step is to choose to harp once again on the term "undue hardship". Obviously I'm not the first to step into this situation unaware that it's already become a bit of a hardened conceptual atmosphere where a culture of righteous "deleters" has taken to looking for the best possible arguments to support the mission to delete all "non-free" content as quickly as possible. It this is at all true, the angle here at the moment would appear to be to attempt to mock the situation by picking out the weakest example I gave and harping on why it won't work because of all those irresponsible and lazy users out there, rather than deal with the possiblity that there might be a more useful and accurate alternative to the current words "is available or could be created". We ought be able to admit that the words "or could be created" do lend a good bit of leverage to those on a mission to delete, do they not? In other words, this is about maximizing leverage rather than attempting to state the Board's intent in as accurate a way as possible. I surely would not want to get in the way of that kind of stampede. I'm outta here; have a nice day everybody-- talk with y'all after I cool off about having gotten myself caught in the middle of this unfortunate set of tensions here. ... Kenosis 18:32, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

It makes me very sad that the Wikipedia consciously has decided to exclude images from its content that are specifically allowed under copyright and fair use criteria. I am referring to the "Free image or no image" policy. I have been contribuing to Wikipedia for a few weeks and so I have read the guidelines and searched for the rationale behind this policy so that I can understand it. I would like to be a responsible contributor, but this policy only serves to disappoint and anger me; since it is not explained anywhere and doesn't seem to me to be rational. I would greatly appreciate it if someone could provide a cogent, reasoned, exaplanation as to why this policy exists. Thanks. Christopher Rath 18:21, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Do you mind if we start a new section for this question? It's slightly off the topic of this section and is an important question on its own. Sancho 18:24, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Please. Christopher Rath 22:38, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

The licensing resolution

You asked for it, you got it. A separate section on the licensing resolution. What is it?

This. The Wikimedia Foundation owns our servers and runs our project, so they lay down the law. They want us to generate content that can be re-used by all, free of copyright restrictions, a goal some see as conflicting with being a comprehensive encyclopedia. To do that they are limiting use of images, video, audio, etc., that have copyright restrictions. This March they told us our "EDP" (embodied as WP:NONFREE policy and guidelines) has to conform to their criteria. We did that, but it is a work in progress and not without controversy.

What is the issue here?

As per the Foundation, WP:NONFREE cannot allow images "where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file for the same purpose" and "replaced with a freely licensed work whenever one is available which will serve the same educational purpose." We can make it tighter than that but we can't make it looser. Wikidemo 00:41, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I recommend including, among the options under consideration, quoting the language of the Board as to this issue that has proven to be repetively contentious. Specifically, my preliminary proposal is to consider changing the text of the first sentence in Criterion #1 of WP:NFC (the Wikipedia EDP) to read: "Non-free" content is used only where no freely licensed equivalent is currently available, or where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file that would serve the same encyclopedic purpose. ... Kenosis 01:16, 1 August 2007 (UTC) ...

I've taken the initiative to ask one of the Wikimedia Board members, via email, to consider how they might wish to further clarify the licensing resolution issued in March. I think that a further clarification of the Board's intent would help the community here get a better idea about such things as the statement "where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed image" and a few other issues that have not been able to achieve a stable consensus here. Hopefully at some point in the near future someone from the Board will be willing and able to provide needed clarification as to how WP might proceed to implement the transition towards using as many freely-licensed images as possible. Lacking a response directly from them, I imagine Jimbo's talk page would be another approach to try to peaceably settle some of the ongoing disagreements and sources of confusion. ... Kenosis 16:02, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

The key word is "replace", not "delete prior to a replacement being available." That is what is happening now. Deletions of fair use material occurs before the replacement is available and the sum of all human knowledge is lesser for it. --Tbeatty 23:01, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Changes to criterion one

Are we really entertaining a rewrite of Criterion #1? If so, Can I suggest something I mentioned above, that we:

• Adopt the exact relevant language from the Foundation licensing resolution so there is no question whether our policy complies, and no need for people to turn back to the resolution to figure out what our policy means?
• Add specific language for places where we want to be more restrictive than the resolution, if any, and make clear that's what we're doing.
• Simplify the remainder of Criterion 1 by moving commentary, suggestions, tests, etc., to the guideline page

May I also suggest that we take off the table any discussion that the resolution itself is wrong? That is not pertinent to changing our policy because for the sake of our policy we have to take the resolution as given. Wikidemo 00:41, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

The official policy seems more rational the some of the arguments that have been on this page. It could be the opening line in criterion #1. (Or the entire thing.) -- SWTPC6800 02:55, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I advocate changing the language of the first sentence of NFCC #1 to include the language the Board gave in the resolution, as follows: Non-free content is used only where no freely licensed equivalent is currently available, or where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file that would serve the same encyclopedic purpose. At a minimum, it is difficult for me to imagine this being any more debatable than the present language which reads "... or could be created ... ". ... Kenosis 21:26, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

It's been a day-and-a-half or two since this proposal was brought, and I see no objections thus far to using the explicit language of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees to replace the phrase "... or could be created..." in the first sentence of NFCC #1. If there are no objections, I propose to replace language in the first sentence of #1 with the language in italics immedately above, say, over the weekend, in WP:NFCC, and then follow up with a request that an administrator do the same for WP:NFC which makes use of the WP:NFCC verbatim. ... Kenosis 01:34, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I would support such a change so long as it includes the remainder of the sentence. That is, "such as is the case for almost all portraits of living notable individuals". I believe this is an important clarification of the first part of the sentence. Without this, we will have endless debates on whether or not we can reasonably expect a replacement to be uploaded. "I looked for fifteen minutes and could not find a replacement." "Nobody has found a replacement in the two years this article has been up here." With the clarification, it is clear that the foundation is not giving blanket permission for fair-use images for living subjects and that these arguments hold no water, but is providing for exceptional cases. So in summary, I oppose the wording change as outlined by Kenosis above but support the wording change if the rest of the Foundation's sentence is included in the rewrite (specifically, "such as is the case for almost all portraits of living notable individuals."). --Yamla 01:50, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

The "such as" clause" from the resolution is already included in the policy in the sentence "As examples, pictures of people who are still alive..." so I assume you mean to replace the policy phrasing with the exact language of the resolution phrase. I support that too. Wikidemo 02:07, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Just to be clear, my goal is that our policy still abides by the Foundation's statement. I don't want a change to provide editors with the mistaken impression that if they can't immediately find a freely licensed replacement, that does not mean they can use a fair-use image solely to depict a living person. This tends to confuse a lot of people so I think we should be as unambiguous as possible (of course, while still allowing the exceptional cases such as, hypothetically, a picture of bin Ladden). I believe including the rest of the Foundation's sentence right there accomplishes that. That is most certainly not the only option, and perhaps it is not even necessary. --Yamla 02:15, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Need comments

Can some please reply to my comments [[10]] here? (Gnevin 15:46, 1 August 2007 (UTC))

BCbot needs you to add something like {{logo fur}} to each of your logo image pages. The copyright tag says when a logo might be used acceptably; but you need to sign off each actual use with a use rationale that it is being used acceptably. Jheald 16:02, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Its a sports logo, their fair use established, i dont need to write an a whole load of crap which 2 months down the line will be out of date when wiki once again changes it's copyright position (Gnevin 19:16, 1 August 2007 (UTC))

Look, all you need to do is to fill the article name into the template above. The template will do all the rest. But it's that or get the image deleted. Jheald 19:35, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Whoawhoawhoa, the standard template was one thing, but when did we start boilerplating rationales altogether? Boilerplate can't be a rationale. I'll be writing up a TfD for that one in a bit here, unless anyone can say why not. That's no different than saying "The license tag is a rationale". Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:05, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

There is no prohibition against templated rationales. The prohibition is against using the copyright tags as rationales. For rationales, if the rationale is valid the rationale is valid. The issue has been discussed extensively and became the subject of edit wars, so please help improve things rather than opposing legitimate attempts to comply with Wikipedia's use rationale policies. Wikidemo 21:20, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Good old wiki politics , start off intending to make things simple and make its ever more complex, the sport-logo was fine it did exactly what it said of the tin eg this is a logo of a sporting organisation and is and always will be fair use but that just to easy lets "improve" things where by you have to spell out for no reason what the template said . God i hate wiki's ever changing fair use/copyright, policy common scene is always the 1st to forgotten(Gnevin 21:29, 1 August 2007 (UTC))

Also, upon taking a closer look at the template, you're actually doing users of that template a disservice, since the source isn't being specified (as in, where did you get it, not where does the boilerplate template think you can get it), they can be tagged and speedied for lack of source information. Of course, it's perfectly acceptable to add the source outside of the template, or subst the template and hand-alter it, but people might forget to do that. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 10:58, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

No, no disservice at all. If one were to look at the template, one would see it is fully parameterized and the message you describe is a warning given when users do not otherwise specify the source. The statement that the logo is obtainable from the owner is correct nearly all the time. If the image editor does know the source they can indicate it by using Website= (if it came from a website), Owner= (if one knows the owner), or Source= (for a free-hand description of source). However, there are plenty of times when we don't know where the image came from, and it would be an abuse of process to delete those images. For one, many images have source information outside of the use rationale, in the image description. For another, people who use the image are not always the same as the uploader. The uploader is the only one who knows for certain. Anyone else fixing the image can at best repeat what the uploader said, or if the uploader did not say, where they think it came from or where it may be found. We do let people fix and use images, and don't delete them merely because the uploader is not the person adding the rationale. Now, perhaps, a little attention to complying with image policy rather than deleting images? Wikidemo 12:37, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

The Corbis/Getty argument

I was looking through some IfDs, and I noticed people arguing that because Corbis or Getty Images (the two largest stock photography agencies in the world) are selling some of the non-free pictures that we use with fair use rationales, that this is a reason to delete them. This is patent nonsense. If the fair-use rationale is valid, and the image is low-resolution, our use of the picture will in no way impede their ability to sell their (very) high-resolution copies of the image. It may be that the valid fair use of historic images on Wikipedia will have to be built up again by people who know what they are doing, and providing the proper rationales, but I would plead with those nominating historic images for deletion to stop and think for a moment. Nominating popular culture images is relatively easy to judge, but for historic images a feel for the history is needed. The IfD on the iconic Einstein tongue image is a case in point - the nominator failed to investigate thoroughly enough and demonstrated only that they were not aware of the iconic nature of the image. If other images like this are being nominated left, right and centre, then there won't always be people available with a grounding in history to point out why a particular image is historic.

The Corbis argument came at this IfD about the Planck-Einstein picture. If you go to the Corbis website and search for "Planck Einstein", sure enough, the picture is there. But if you search for "Flag Iwo Jima", you will find that Joe Rosenthal's iconic image is also there, yet we quite rightly use that image under fair-use in Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. Can someone explain to me why NFCC #2 makes any sense anyway, as I thought non-free images were stripped out before downstream users can reuse Wikipedia's content for commercial purposes? Carcharoth 22:36, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Agreed with Carcharoth on the whole. The closing admin of the Einstein-Planck image did close against consensus, but apparently did enough research to be able to show that Bettman archives was given credit for the image by the newspaper using it in the link provided. At least the closing admin provided clear evidence in support of the closure of it as "delete". If there is sufficient evidence that it qualifies as fair-use nonetheless a Wp:drv can be filed and the issue can be revisited in this case. I agree it's a shame, because that is a classic image of historical interest.

With respect to criterion #2, it unquestionably belongs there and it is quite consistent with basic copyright protection. Where many arguments occur in court and between parties' lawyers is in deciding interpretation of this criterion. Obviously if Bettman/Corbis owns the rights to the image, they should be given credit for it when used under a fair-use justification. I'll put in an inquiry about this and try to find out more exactly what the rules are there. Again, it seems a shame with an image like that one to unnecessarily lose it in the middle of this battle over "free" vs. "non-free". Whether you're a science buff, scientist or a history buff, it's one of those pictures that is worth the proverbial thousand words. ... Kenosis 22:56, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

NFCC #2 is supposed to encapsulate the fourth fair use factor under U.S. law: "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." If we use non-free content in the manner that is intended by the copyright holder, that's more likely going to be copyright infringement, but a transformative use gives us a better defense (not that transformative uses are guaranteed to be fair use, but it's a factor that usually goes in favor of fair use). Wikidemo or one of our other lawyer Wikipedians may be better-suited to respond to that. howcheng {chat} 23:02, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, of course (and incidentally, good to meet you here Howcheng). Criterion #2 expresses this fair-use factor very well, IMO. The question being raised here is, in part, how to interpret it for practical purposes on WP without subjecting the foundation or others to unnecessary legal exposure and possible unnecessary expense. I'd sure like to have handy access to some examples from US legal cases where the issue has come up. At some point in the hopefully not-too-distant future, it would be nice to have a concise set of summaries as examples of how this factor is typically interpreted. My gut hunch, yet to be confirmed, is that low-resolution images, particularly of historical events, that are not for sale for profit probably are not generally considered by courts to be "likely to replace the original market role of the original copyrighted media." But I'm open to correction upon seeing the relevant case law. ... Kenosis 03:45, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

• I've notified the closing admin of this discussion, and suggested relisting or DRV as possible options, but invited him to discuss here first. Carcharoth 23:57, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

I would not suggest relisting but please feel free to take to deletion review. -Nv8200p talk 02:39, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Criteria for speedy deletion G12, and please do not upload images owned by companies that license photography to websites to Wikimedia servers. Thanks. Jkelly 03:14, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Not sure that G12 applies here, or whether G12 is correct at all. If an image is taken from some place, and it also happens to appear on Corbis, who is to say Corbis owns exclusive rights? They may well have a license themselves, or no rights at all. We've recently encountered some cases where image banks simply scavenged images where they could without any chain of copyright ownership, then claimed a right to license them. Moreover, G12 asserts that any use of an image owned by a service that licenses content out for web use is a "blatant copyright violation." That statement cannot be true in a broad sense and contracts the clear wording of the US copyright statute. We're trying to reason through whether it is true at all. That's a legal query, not a policy question. Wikidemo 06:28, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikidemo is right. Merely being on Corbis's website does not mean they have exclusive rights. You have to look closely at how they obtained the photograph, and that is not always possible. For example, Image:WW2 Iwo Jima flag raising.jpg is on the Corbis website. Do you think that image should be deleted under G12? Carcharoth 10:13, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Unquestionably Wikidemo and Carcharoth are correct here. Massive photo archives such as Corbis take images that of themselves are plainly the property of the public and quite frequently will attach some particular right to a particular manifestation or re-creation of that image. For example, in the case of Corbis:

• "Flag Iwo Jima" under "rights managed" returns the following result:"All Images (103) Commercial (19) Editorial (44) Historical (32) Art (7) News (15) Sports (1) Entertainment (8)" "Flag Iwo Jima" under "royalty-free" produces 0 results.
• "Earth Apollo" under "rights managed" returns the following result: "All Images (189) Commercial (43) Editorial (95) Historical (149) Art (1) News (8) Sports (0) Entertainment (3) RF (0)," with the number of "royalty free" images stated as 0.
• "Planck Einstein" under "Rights managed" produces the following result: "All Images (2) Commercial (0) Editorial (0) Historical (2) Art (0) News (0) Sports (0) Entertainment (0) RF (0)," while "Planck Einstein" under "royalty-free" produces 0 results, with both Einstein-Planck images explicitly stated to be historical.

Does anybody begin to see a pattern? I think it would be premature to presume that any image, particularly historical images and other images that are part of the common public "consciousness" already, are subject to speedy deletion or any basis for deletion simply because someone or some group owns the high-quality negative, so to speak. Undoubtedly the community here will need to get back to this issue and get better clarity on it at some point in the near future. As to #12 of the Speedy Deletion Criteria, quite obviously it will need to be clarified, lest some corporation be presumed to have taken over the rights to everything on Wikipedia. ... Kenosis 14:04, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

This is indeed an interesting legal question I've thought a lot about but have no conclusion. Normally, using a thumbnail or low resolution copy of photos used for certain purposes qualifies as fair use. The Copyright Statute says flat out that reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment...is not an infringement of copyright." Then it lays out four factors, including "the purpose and character of the use" and "the effect of the use upon the potential market." Where an image comes from a fine art photographer, a film, a video production, a poster company, a promotional image, and so on, there is no argument that the use on Wikipedia is transformative, i.e that it is used in a context that does not threaten the original market. The image's purpose to the owner is to sell videos, posters, films, etc. And secondarily, if the copyright is held by the photographer the purpose is to sell freelance photography services. The use on Wikipedia for illustrating articles does not replace the original. There's a tougher case when the original image is from a news photographer, press service, paparazzo, encyclopedia, textbook, or the like. There, what is being sold is news content nonfiction prose by the owner, or if in the hands of the photographer, licensing services. If it were legal to simply crib news photos wherever you want, there is no sustainable copyright for news photographers because as soon as they publish their photo anyone can re-use it for any news purposes. The use is not transformative. If you can get the picture on Wikipedia and Wikinews, there is less incentive to buy a newspaper or book to see the picture, and therefore less incentive for the newspaper or book to hire the photographer. Yet the statute unambiguously says that news use is not a copyright infringement. The final question is what happens when a photo previously used for some other purpose gets bought by an image library like Corbis. They have been scavenging more and more images, and often own them shortly after creation. Wire services like AP might own them to begin with. They see that what had been fair and "transformative" use - education, news, thumbnails, links, encyclopedias, commentary - can actually be a lucrative market if they could charge a licensing fee for it. In other words, they set themselves up to charge license fees for things that would be fair use. I'm not convinced they can do an end run around fair use this way. Allowing that re-using a newsworthy image cannot be fair use if owned by a copyright holder in the business of licensing news photos, or re-using historically significant photos if owned by parties in the business of licensing the same, or using images on the web if owned by parties that charge for web images, would essentially spell the end of fair use. My hunch is the courts would not go for it, but the image libraries could put up quite a fight. But I'm not aware of the case law on this or any authoritative commentary from respected copyright lawyers. Wikidemo 06:28, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

This does raise some interesting questions that probably deserve wider exposure if people are misunderstanding how image libraries manage photo rights, and are unaware of the practice of image libraries using licenses themselves, or acting on behalf of others, rather than exclusively owning content. Given the blessing of the deleting admin above, and if there are no other objections, I will take this to deletion review. Carcharoth 10:29, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Please go ahead, as this ought give an opportunity for users paying attention to these issues an opportunity to discuss and learn about this practice of archives to attach copyrights to particular manifestations of images that they quite frequently do not have exclusive rights to reproduce. Frankly, an overly strict or flawed interpretation of some of these issues towards the idealized goal of "only free content" can easily have the opposite effect of allowing private entities to co-opt public domain and fair-use material if people are not well informed about the relevant legal and practical issues, such as the appearance that some corporation controls the rights to those famous pictures of earth taken from the Apollo spacecraft, or, possibly, the Planck-Einstein photo. I would look forward to seeing the results of our collective research into the history of that 1929 photograph, assuming we're able, and would look forward to seeing someone who controls the rights to some particular version of it to explicitly release it under a free license. In the interim, this appears to me to be one of those photographs for which no one or no group can control all copyrights, so long as WP doesn't display the manifestation that the particular corporation or other entity may claim to control certain rights to a particular version of it-- though this remains to be seen upon doing the necessary research. ...

I should mention that I got a brief email note back from Jimbo Wales yesterday making clear that he very much appreciates the efforts of users on a mission to delete the massive amount of unnecessary fair-use material. I haven't heard back whether I should feel free to quote exactly what he wrote in the email, but it is clear to me that he is wholeheartedly in support of the efforts of Howcheng, Abu badali and the many other users who seek to clear out vast amounts of unnecessary fair-use material. I feel free to say that he estimates the percentage of unnecessary fair-use material across the wiki to be in excess of 90% of the images presently posted under fair-use rationales, and is unquestionably in support of maximizing the amount of explicitly freely-licensed material. Thus, it would be important, IMO, to get clear on what that remaining less-than-10% would rightfully consist of as the wiki transitions towards maximum possible freely licensed material in the future. ... Kenosis 15:05, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Incidentally, at http://corbis.com/ the search "Lee Harvey Oswald Jack Ruby" returns 97 images under "rights controlled" and 0 images under "royalty-free". I highly recommend looking through them; perhaps folks will recognize a few that are already on WP. Similarly, "Kennedy assassination" returns 1032 results, of which only four are said to be "royalty free". I recommend looking through those too; click on RF and see which four are displayed as "royalty free". This is important to get a perspective on, IMO, lest Wikipedia editors head too far in a direction where WP is mistakenly presumed to have been denied the use of all important content of any public value in the future. (And in the meantime, of course, there's that other estimated "90+%" Kudos to everybody here; I recognize these are not easy issues to get a clear understanding of, and it's plain to me that all here are involved with the intent of helping the project.) ... Kenosis 15:34, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

• Deletion review for that image is here. Carcharoth 17:01, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

• And a proposal to revise G12 is here. Carcharoth 21:33, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Images promoting films

Further to our discussion in Archive 24 (here), questionable silent IfD closures to delete promotional images of both Harry Potter and Storm are both now up for Deletion Review. Jheald 19:25, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

School photo on murdered girl's page

A complex Fair Use issue is currently at DRV. This concerns a deleted photo used on the page of a murdered girl. The main proponent of the image is claiming that the photo qualifies for Fair Use reguardless of other concerns. On the other side we have an admin stating that, depending who owns the photos, the image likely does not qualify for Fair Use. And the issue of who owns the photos is a murky one as well. I'm getting headaches trying to sort through it all. So I figured I would come ask for additional input on the DRV from people who know the Fair Use policy much better than I do. So far, other than the image's submitter, noone is expressing endorse or overturn of the deletion. Rather, the discussion has been circling around trying to establish what are the issues at play in the first place. Any additional input would be very welcome. - TexasAndroid 19:50, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

The murky ownership was the reason for deletion. The copyright holder was never properly attributed on the image description page, meaning that it did not comply with WP:NFCC#10a. Videmus Omnia ^Talk 20:14, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

This is exactly the sort of case NFCC#10a is intended to apply to - contemporary pictures where the copyright holder likely is still alive. However, NFCC#10a fails to take into account cases where the copyright holder cannot be attributed because the image is very old. There are lots of old images floating around where the rights status is unclear. I will expand on this below. Carcharoth 21:39, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Image tagging needs to change

To start off, let me say that I do appreciate the many hours of work that a lot of people have put into tagging non-free images, and notifying the image uploaders of their need to provide sourcing and licensing information, or fair use rationales, or otherwise satisfy our policy requirements. Likewise, I agree that our mission is, in part, to provide an abundance of free content, and that using non-free content hampers that goal. However, I've seen too many incidents where someone tagging images as lacking sources or rationales will effectively spam the crap out of a poor user's talk page, often leaving several dozen messages in just a few minutes, frequently resulting in 30, 40, 50, or even over 100 kilobytes of text. All too often, most or all of these messages are nearly exactly the same, or even precisely identical, except for the specific image they point to. This particular practice needs to change. Yes, we should be tagging images, and yes, we should be notifying image uploaders of their options, but no, we should not be doing so in the most in-your-face, harassing way possible. A huge number of people have been rightly annoyed to wake up to a flood of redundant text, both on their talk page and in its history. Many newcomers, I suspect, are quite dismayed when the little ten-line welcome message is dwarfed by a sea of inhuman, unfriendly, foreboding templates which look quite a lot like vandalism warnings.

So, what can we change about this? My largest priority, indeed perhaps my only priority at this point, is to reduce the amount of harassment and spam involved in the process. Rather than flooding a talk page with dozens of templates, we could use the template once, and then build a list of affected images to place after the template. I am aware that many image taggers use scripts, and that it is convenient for scripts to follow a "tag image, tag talk page" method; however, our use of scripts highlights how very unacceptable this practice is, in my opinion. By changing the relevant scripts only once, we can avoid countless unfortunate incidents of frustrated old-timers driven to anger, or of earnest but discouraged newcomers who are effectively run out of the project. User scripts are not an excuse for user behavior. It seems to me that the use of scripts would easily allow the sort of "queued list" I've described above. Other ideas or solutions are welcome.

Unfortunately, altering these scripts is beyond my ability. But it is something that I think needs to be done. The less time we spend arguing amongst ourselves, the less ill will we spread, the more time we can afford to spend clearing these backlogs and educating people about why we should be keeping Wikipedia free. – Luna Santin (talk) 03:21, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

I understand the point that is being raised here. But really, how hard is it for a problem uploader to remove these messages if (s)he doesn't want to see them on their talk page? 5 seconds and a couple of mouse clicks. There's nothing personal intended against the problem uploaders, but notification is mandatory, and there are tens of thousands of images to clean up and not many people working on it. If people don't want their feeling hurt, they should go back through their upload logs and fix their non-free images to comply with policy. I don't see many people doing that, compared to the number of people complaining about being "spammed" with warnings. Videmus Omnia ^Talk 03:27, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

The predominant issue is not "problem uploaders." Overwhelmingly the issue is images loaded a long while ago, either before there was a policy at all or at a time where the policy was poorly publicized and almost completely unenforced. Notices are falling on accounts that are infrequently used or completely inactive. Secondarily, new users who try their best to be helpful and comply with the policies they know about, find it very difficult to understand both the policy -- what it is, where it is, and the tools to follow it. It is a big usability problem with Wikipedia, and I think it's unfair and perhaps counterproductive to call new users who try but fail to figure out our systems "problem users." It's been claimed variously that 70-95+% of newly uploaded images are noncompliant, mostly because they lack appropriate data, not necessarily because they are inappropriate for Wikipedia. If 70-95% of users don't get it right, the problem is the system, not the users. Finally, the culpability of individual uploaders is not at issue. Images on Wikipedia belong to the public, to all of us editors, to the readers. We're trying to make Wikipedia better on a systematic basis, not teach new users a lesson. The current system is still overwhelmingly stacked to deleting images rather than making them compliant, and it's not even very efficient at that. I don't think Luna Santin is proposing overturning policy, simply asking for some better tools. Wikidemo 05:35, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

I would tend to agree - the current bot tags are too verbose at the moment. It would probably be better to have something simple like:

"(HEADER)Problem with an image you have uploaded"

"This is an automated message about an image you have uploaded. The image (image name) lacks a (source|license tag|fair use rationale). A tutorial explaining how to fix this is available here. Note that the image will be deleted on 5 August if it's not tagged."

Subsequent image problems coming to the same page would add to the same section:

"The image (image name) also has a problem with a missing (source|license tag|fair use rationale)"

Reducing the size of the warning would largely stop the grumbing - and merging subsequent warnings into the first section would prevent talk page flood (tm). Megapixie 06:06, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Such as a colaspable template? User:Zscout370 ^{(Return Fire)} 06:09, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

That's fine for newly-uploaded images. For legacy images there should be a way to alert people who view or edit an article that an image is about to be deleted, and a notification sent out to people who have edited the image or the article. Watch lists help a little. But it would be far better if any image that's up for deletion would be visible as such, e.g. a red border and a special link (easy enough to do with a template). Wikidemo 06:36, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

So you are saying we should message everyone who have edted and image or an article that include the image if it's tagged for deletion? Seems to me that would just multiply the percieved "spam" problem tenfould. As for a way to make it clear to people who jead an article that an image it it has been tagged for deletion I've been thinking: We have the MediaWiki software change pending at low priority, so that might take a while... However using the querry API and some Ajax it might be possible to hack together a JavaScript that would trigger after the article has finished loading and then go though and check all the images in the article and "flagg" (put a red border around it or something) images that contain scertain templates, we would not have to wait for a software change for that. We'll want to test and debug it thouroughly before adding it to the global script, but it might be worth a shot. I'll look into it myself time permitting, but I'm not JS guru so anyone want to pitch in would be appreciated. --Sherool (talk) 20:49, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Please no image page loading kludges. We just need a simple feature to make this work without trouble: [11]. Go vote in bugzilla. ;) --Gmaxwell 20:57, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

A few random thoughts. To reduce spam we could create a subpage for each user, or a central place with different user subpages, consisting of a list of all images that user has uploaded, modified, articles, etc., that are up for deletion. Instead of getting the complete warning, the talk page would then get a simple warning: Notice: some image(s) you have uploaded, inserted, and/or edited are newly up for deletion. Check here for further details. If we're putting in requests for software mods, how about incorporating the copyright tags and rationales into the database, not in text form in the image page? And an item that demands and enforces a fair use rationale (or some kind of further data) every time you add a copyrighted image to a page? A harmless kludge would be for the image tagging bots to encapsulate images in articles in a template. So if you see IMAGE:PROMOPHOTO it becomes {{template:deletableimag|IMAGE:PROMOPHOTO|DATE=XXXX]]}}, and the template puts a red border around. No javascript necessary? Wikidemo 21:32, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree the software change would be the best, however I suggested something simmilar about 6 months, back, it was just changed to "Lowest" priotiry and pretty much ignored since, so I stopped holding my breath. You are more into the technical side of things so maybe you'll have better luck getting though. I was suggesting using the API to querry for used templates directly rater than parse the actual image page, but yeah a JavaScript is clearly not ideal, just though it might work as a temporary "patch" while we wait. Do you think it would be too inefficient or just a waste of time to set up with a software change hopefully soon comming to jo the job? --Sherool (talk) 22:23, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Some people do get somewhat upset with the warnings I suppose, but honestly I don't think it's new users so much. If it is they almost never complain about it at WP:MCQ. Anyway, this is more difficult than it seems. Building up a list of problem images and then editing in one huge batch would be messy. Also remember, we would have to coordinate this with other people tagging images at the time. Wikidemo's idea of having a user sub-page listing the problem images wouldn't be too bad but then you lose the benefit of actually having enough text to explain the problem. If you do include enough text to explain the problem, you may as well put it on the user talk page as on a subpage. I agree this whole process isn't ideal. If your constraints are that you want everyone to upload images, you want to avoid offending users by telling them their images may be deleted, you want to inform users that their images may be deleted, and you want to remove problem images there is no easy solution. We have to pick one, limit uploads to people that won't cause problems, not care about people's hurt feelings at getting too many messages, not tell people their images will be deleted, or not care if we have problem images. I would lean towards not being overly concerned about people's feeling regarding the templates. After that perhaps limiting who uploads? That also introduces new problems though... - cohesion 22:25, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

While we're talking about the warnings, they could be a lot more informative and user friendly, as should the pages they link to. I don't know if they're still pointing to Betacommandbot's page where he has the big stop hand up telling people they broke the policy, he runs the bot whenever he feels like, and they have no basis to complain. We should coordinate something that lets people know they may have made an oops and show them, in this order: (i) what they can do to fix their image, or remove it if inappropriate, (ii) what the policies and guideliens are, where they come from, and why they exist, and (iii) what the current enforcement effort is all about and what the authority is for it. Right now we're in the bottom 10% as far as websites that tell users what they are supposed to to do. Simply pointing them to the policy page is like tacking the latest section of municipal code up to the city hall basement. Sure it serves some kind of formal notice purpose but it really doesn't get the message out Wikidemo 01:55, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Just to point out, Betacommandbot does leave a message on the talk page of an article that contains the image. If anyone has a better suggestion for the message the bot leaves, I'm sure Betacommand would be fine with updating it with something we can come up with. -- Ned Scott 02:30, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Also the tool most people use just slaps one of a few templates on the page, there's nothing special about them, they could be improved if you see any problems. - cohesion 02:56, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Ive asked repeatedly about improving the messages that BCbot leaves. Wikidemo before bashing me about my bots talkpage and the stop sign, you might want to understand why I put it there and what is contained in that message. I clearly state what the bot does, what the relevant policies are, a request to read the page and the archives. (before placing this template I would get 2 or 3 sections together asking the same thing and I would have to reply basically the same way three times. personally I dont like being a broken record). I also state that I will not write rationales for users. (people asked why not just create a bot to write rationales, or instead of tagging the images you should fix them yourself/leave them alone if you dont want to fix the rationales.) I have done almost everything in my power to spread the notifications to other areas. I notify all uploaders and articles where the image is used. the only part that i am still working on for that is wikiproject support. As for reducing the amount of text that BCBot leaves with multi warnings Im trying to develop ideas for doing this successfully with a bot. (again thoughts and input about said messages are welcome) ^∆ 03:58, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Can someone tell me whether a situation I encountered has been fixed? I came to a page with some images and edited it. There was no indication that anything was wrong with the images. I wouldn't normally check the talk page, but for some reason I did. Only then did I notice that a bot had left a warning tag on the talk page about the images. Only then did I click on the image and see the warning tag left there. Currently people who only read an article, or edit it after the bot has tagged an image used there, don't get any warning that the image has been tagged. Everything looks OK to them until the image turn into a redlink and is then removed shortly afterwards. Is that an accurate description of the process? Carcharoth 11:35, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

There is an assumption that something is wrong. I assume from your tone that you would like to see some indication on the article itself? (This would be solved by the enhancement request that Gmaxwell mentions above, btw.) Betacommandbot does leave a note on the talk page, which is more than most (if not all) human editors tagging images do. There are three things to balance here. 1. You have thousands of images that need attention by a few people, the more you make them do the less they will get through. 2. People that want to be informed in as many places as possible, and 3. people that want the article page to look pristine at all times (this is not an insignificant contingent). I'm sure betacommandbot could easily slap a tag on the top of article pages saying "This article contains some images that are pending deletion", but that would make many editors upset. - cohesion 13:12, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I thought that was the situation. Thanks for confirming that - it would be nice if this was clearly documented somewhere that was itself linked from lots of relevant places. I was aware of the enhancement Gmaxwell has proposed, I think I encountered it in an earlier version when the proposal was to directly edit the image - not a good idea with lossy formats like jpegs. If this new enhancement works, it will be great, though it would have been nicer if the enhancement had been implemented sooner, or with more urgency. It could have avoided a lot of drama. I guess I should also remember to watchlist pages I read and enjoy reading (it is only one click after all), though having the watchlist limited to articles I had edited was convenient, ultimately it is not enough to just do that. Personally, I think an unobtrusive tag on top of a page using a tagged image would be perfectly justified. Something like the page protected icons, but different. Carcharoth 13:38, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I personally wouldn't mind it either, but I think it has some resistance. The problem with documenting the different processes is that they are quite complex and always changing. I was thinking about this yesterday. I mean betacommandbot is doing one thing, and orphanbot is doing something else, the upload page has some implications to the system, as well as what a lot of users do. WP:PUI, and WP:IFD have processes, {{Di-replaceable fair use}} has it's own process... It all works together but it is very organic. A user created Category:New images to be reviewed yesterday, in a very well-meaning attempt to tag images at upload that may need more attention. This would negatively impact some of our other processes however, but you're right, there is no particular place those processes are documented. Should there be? I hesitate to do it, because I wouldn't want to make more creep etc. Things work ok now, and the various people working on different things don't necessarily even interact with one another. - cohesion 18:40, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Request for comment regarding CSD I7

Comment at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Simplification of criterion I7. Cheers, Iamunknown 17:40, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Stronger protection for older content

Deleting an image that was uploaded today or yesterday is far less likely to result in permanent loss to Wikipedia than deleting an image that was uploaded six months or a year ago. The latter type of administrative action really should come after significant deliberation and should only be carried out as a "CSD" action when the need is clear and damning (e.g. images with zero source information or images which can immediately be replaced with their free equivalents). Just as an example, I've been away from Wikipedia for some time, but I use the site extensively as a reader. Thus, I happened to notice that an image that I uploaded was tagged a while back. I commented on the user page of the person who tagged it,[12] and assumed that he would take the correct steps to address the need for caution. Today I notice that it was deleted entirely. This image was of a doctor at the Nobel Prize ceremony when he won. Clearly, there was no free equivalent of this image, and yet it was deleted by Quadell without any community deliberation, on the basis that it was "replaceable". Perhaps others would have agreed. Perhaps they would not. But, I've had more than one such tagging revoked by the user that put it in place in the past, so clearly this was a case that could have used further consideration.

It is therefore my contention that images on this site should be divided into three categories: newly uploaded (less than 1 day); recently uploaded (less than 1 month); and established images. The first two categories should certainly be policed with a strong eye toward deletion of content that's not in-line with policy, but the latter category should be deleted speedily only when the images in question actively and clearly violate indisputable policy. Beyond that, some form of discussion really should be available to users. -Harmil 22:14, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Retaining historical images that will likely soon become free

Following on from the discussions above, I'd like to propose here that we take a different attitude to historical pictures of uncertain status, and very old historical pictures that will soon become free, as opposed to the current restrictive attitude. My reasoning is the following: (1) historical pictures (generally over 70 years old) of uncertain status may soon (in the next 10 or 20 years) become free. (2) if the status is not known now, it is unlikely that a copyright holder will emerge. Even old pictures where a copyright is claimed may soon fall into the public domain by age. I suggest that we tag them with an appropriate tag, use them under fair-use if we can, and then claim them as free when they fall into the public domain. This will increase the amount of free content we have. What do people think? Carcharoth 15:56, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Over 90% of the IfD's go virtually uncontested, or only mildly contested. This is, as has been mentioned before, a result of hard work by users such as Howcheng, Abu badali, Videmus Omnia, and others too. But, I want to say that this relatively recent trend of tendentious argumentation that has reared it's ugly head in some of the IfD's and Drv's is disturbing to me. The apparent penchant among some users for a kind of wikilawyering that specializes in NFCC criteria, an approach which leans especially heavily on the very subjective NFCC#8 and overly broad interpretations of NFCC#2, is also disturbing. So too is unreasonable insistence on conclusively proving public domain where a reasonable search indicates an image is likely in the public domain, thereby subjecting editors to the same NFCC#8 and NFCC#2 arguments pracically ad infinitum.
....... Historical photographs, along with contemporary iconic figures and such, are part of our common cultural heritage. Wikipedia originally billed itself with a pitch for everyone to imagine what it would be like to have access to all the information in the world, of which images are an extremely important part in a competent contemporary presentation. IMO, at this stage in its admittedly complicated and rapid development, allowing Wikipedia's lawful rights to be usurped by commercial entities who might seek to co-opt our common heritage for their own gain would not serve Wikipedia's interests in the short term or in the long run. And, running in fear of the possibility that someone will assert authorship of photographs that upon reasonable searches appear to be in the public domain, or that someone or some entity might assert some form of copyright in support of their commercial self-interests in dealing high-resolution photographic images of our common heritage because WP has posted a low-resolution image of the same photograph, would not serve Wikipedia's interests either in the short term or in the long run. ... Kenosis 17:46, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

• I do not consider this to be a strong enough argument to keep an image that will "soon become free" in 10-20 years. I could see a strong argument for something about to become free in 1-2 years. 10-20 years could represent millions of dollars in income for the image owner. -Nard 20:02, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
  • • Um, I'm not talking about images where someone exists who is claiming exclusive rights on the image. (Well, part of my original statement was, so I've struck that). I'm talking about cases where there is no-one making claims on an image. There may be people making money out of the images, but that doesn't mean they can claim copyright (though they often do). Commercial photo libraries often sell such images of uncertain history and make money out of them (mainly because they provide high-resolution copies). Why should we not use such images (low resolution if necessary) and make a better encyclopedia with them? Carcharoth 21:25, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
  • If there is no line to be drawn then perhaps all historical pictures where the copyright owner is unknown and unknowable should receive the same treatment, i.e. used if there is a strong and widely applicable fair use purpose but noted as such. Images that are used legally and that fit criteria #8 for significance add to the encyclopedic purpose, which is one of our two main mission goals; removing legal images that are unlikely to cause us or any other user user any copyright problems does not serve the mission goal of free content, or any other purpose Wikidemo 21:10, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

• I'l give one example of copyright paranoia going berserk: once on Commons someone submitted all images of Austro-Hungarian coins for delete (A-H ceased to exist in 1918) arguing that their status is not clear and the mass delete is just part of larger cleanup among coins. This person had no clue about local legislative of the time but pursuing "the right way" one obviously doesn't need to know much, few slogans and simplistic rules are enough. Pavel Vozenilek 22:16, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

• IMO, no line needs to be drawn anywhere prior to the theoretical expiration plus every theoretical extension in various jurisdictions for photographs that appear to be in the public domain. The collaborative efforts of WP "policy wonks" who collectively have devleoped such categories as are evident in the often conflicting copyright and PD templates, e.g. at Template:PD, Wikipedia:Image_copyright_tags/Public_domain, and in the current operations of User:OrphanBot, contain some almost bizarre manifestations that amount to, as I said above, Wikipedia running afraid that someone will step forward and say "hey, that's my 1938 photograph" or some similar situation. In an online collaborative encyclopedia such as Wikipedia, a reasonable search and a declaration by the uploader, or someone following up on the uploader, to the effect that "no author appears to have claimed copyright for the original photograph" should give rise to a requirement that someone rebut the presumption that the user making the statement is incorrect, subject to further discussion, possible counterarguments and any other follow-up as may be needed. The same goes for "free images". A statement such as "I, the owner of this image, hereby release it under the XY license" creates a rebuttable presumption that another user may rebut with relevant evidence. ... Kenosis 22:30, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

• I have been in touch with the copyright holder of some magazines (1930s to 1970s). He started with the publisher in the 1950s so he knows their history. He said they never renewed the copyrights on the magazines after the initial 28 years. I have considered have the copyright office do a search on renewal registrations. (This would cost money.) I am sure some wikilawyer would claim this was inadequate proof of public domain. -- SWTPC6800 23:05, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
  • That should be more than enough evidence of PD. -Nard 23:45, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
  • Yes, this kind of statement by Swtpc6800 should be more than enough evidence of PD status. In other cases of photographs originating in the US that are reasonably believed to have been taken prior to 1977, a reasonable search for the original source or for some indication of a claim of copyright by an author or the author's agents or heirs should be quite adequate, even if the original source isn't found in the search. A search that gives rise to a reasonable belief that a photograph has no known "author" who explicitly claimed copyright, nor other publicly disclosed exclusive copyright holder, should also be adequate. The statement of this reasonable belief by the uploader is rebuttable by either a copyright claimant or by another wikipedia user with evidence that there is a copyright claim of some kind on the original photograph or on some particular manifestation of the original photograph. In such cases, to be safe, use a low resolution image that would not be likely to replace the market role of sellers of high-resolution or electronically enhanced versions of the same image. The statement of the uploader must be reasonable, and if it is reasonable it should be presumed to be stated in good-faith by the uploader, and should be rebuttable by anyone presenting evidence to the contrary. ... Kenosis 00:21, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
    • That's absolutely proof enough of public-domain status, given that no one but the copyright holder could have submitted a valid copyright renewal, and he states that he didn't renew. But that's why actually looking is helpful, it turns out in this case the images are free and we don't have to worry about fair use at all! Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 07:15, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
      • It depends on the situation. For example, if the magazine was published with a copyright notice, the years that the work would have to be published in order to be PD would be from 1923 through 1963. If it was published without a notice, then the publication range will go from 1923 through 1977. Since you told us that he doesn't renew his works, then we can pretty much use the images here under the public domain, according to this hand guide. User:Zscout370 ^{(Return Fire)} 07:52, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Fair use of text - more examples please

There is only one example showing fair use when making text quotations from Wikipedia. The example talks about brief quotations but what is a "brief" quotation?

I have surfed the net some and "fair use" seems to be a difficult subject - but it need not be that on Wikipedia because here we could set up our own rules and make them clear.

There are som interesting such rules called "Four Factor Fair Use Test" at http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/intellectualProperty/copypol2.htm#test

Wikipedia should be able to set up some similar (preferably simpler) rules - or at least give some more examples of how text can be quoted from Wikipedia.

Another related question is how many quotes would be reasonable in a book? One quote per page is that to much for example? Java is cool 11:14, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately there are no clear rules about this. The "four factor test" you mentioned is the legal framework, but it's pretty vague. But that's really all the law provides, unless you want to dig into the case law. Even if you do, different judges rule different ways on the same sort of cases. It's best to avoid anything that could possibly be seen as borderline. A line or two from a book is fine, but a verse from a five-verse poem is unsafe. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 11:55, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

It is a morass but it need not be that on Wikipedia! Wikipedia could set out clear rules for how things can be quoted from Wikipedia into books for example.

If it is difficult to do that for text already entered into Wikipeda, new rules could be made applicable from now for any new text entered.

Or at least some more examples could be added than the single example that is available now. Java is cool 12:36, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Spirit of the policy

Please recall that after some discussion, it was agreed that the sentence "When in doubt as to whether non-free content may be included, please make a judgement based on the spirit of the policy, not necessarily the exact wording" be added into the page. Now the question comes up, what exactly is the "spirit" of the policy? To quote from Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion/2007 July 24#Image:Einstein_TIME_Person_of_the_Century.jpg (portions irrelevant to this discussion have been removed):

[...]. When in doubt, go with the spirit of the policy, which has always been and continues to be, "Don't use non-free content unless absolutely necessary." [...] howcheng {chat} 20:42, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

• That's clearly your take on the spirit of policy. Another take is that NFCC #1 to 10 are intentionally tough enough as they are, additional zealotry is uncalled for, and actually harmful. Jheald 20:48, 2 August 2007

Additional input requested. Thanks. howcheng {chat} 20:59, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

You pretty much nailed it. ::shrugs:: The policy begins with some prose that describes the policies intent to help clarify this point. By design, the policy aims to further the free content part of our mission by being fairly restrictive on the use of non-free or unlicensed works and only allows them when the harm (potential loss of free material, potential legal problems) is minimized and the need is sufficiently compelling. Anyone who is confused about the intent of the policy should .. read it:

The primary goal of Wikipedia's policy for non-free content is to protect our mission to produce content that is perpetually free for unlimited distribution, modification and application by all users in all media. This goal could best be met by completely disallowing all material that is not free; many Wikipedias in other languages allow no non-free content at all. However, to meet another central goal of our mission—the production of a quality encyclopedia—the English Wikipedia permits a limited amount of non-free content under strictly defined circumstances. This policy embodies a compromise between these two goals.

--Gmaxwell 21:15, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Furthermore, if we do figure out what the spirit of the policy is, would it make sense to use {{nutshell}} to sum it up for people? howcheng {chat} 21:09, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Because well written documents sum up their intents neatly in their intros, just like our policy for non-free content does. The silly nutshell boxes just encourage people to have oversimplified understandings. If isn't important to read the rest of the document we should remove it, if it is we should avoid doing things that cause people to skip it. (like nutshell boxes). :) I don't know how it could be any more clear or strongly stated than "Primary goal". --Gmaxwell 21:15, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Shrug. "A compromise between these two goals" is rather different to "not unless absolutely necessary". Jheald 21:21, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Given all the legal concerns beyond copyright, the goal of completely free content is unrealizable, with or without fair use material. And of course, so is the goal of a perfect encyclopedia. These are ideals. To say that we are balancing two competing aspects of our mission does not say where and how the balance lies, so the "spirit of the policy" is no guide here. Where it is a guide, and I think what the statement means, is to avoid wikilawyering (itself a very misunderstood concept). When looking to a specific circumstance don't get hung up on technicalities, figure out what is really at stake. Wikidemo 21:25, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikidemo, for the sake of brevity I removed a segment of text in parenthesis which made it clear what we mean by free content in this context: "("non-free content" means copyrighted material lacking a free content license". Do you really think "The primary goal of Wikipedia's policy ... could best be met by completely disallowing all material that is not free ... to meet another central goal of our mission ... permits a limited amount of non-free content under strictly defined circumstances." doesn't suggest a particular approach to uncertainty resolution? --Gmaxwell 22:03, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

There's a logical problem with the preamble that reveals a deeper conceptual issue. It says primary goal #1 relates only to "non-free" content (defined by copyright). But it then says the goal is in service of "our mission" of producing "content that is perpetually free" (without reference to copyright). And then some editorializing, that I don't fully concur with, about how goal is "best met" and what happens in other languages. In fact, content can never be free if there are trademark, publicity, defamation, and other concerns, or if there are concerns about the accuracy of the recordkeeping and legal analysis. Moreover, in some cases even apparently copyright-free content is not beyond coypright concerns. Trying to weed out all fair use material in hopes that downstream users will never face legal issues is like trying to rid your house of all germs in hopes you never get sick. It just won't work. After a certain point, when you have things under control, the marginal benefit of ever more restrictive policies makes no useful difference to how free the material is. Past a certain point it gets lost in the background noise. I think some of the hair splitting about exactly when it is okay to use a photo of a living person or a dead person, for instance, is not going to make any difference to anybody who would ever reuse the article, and there are far better things we could do to make the content reusable.Wikidemo 22:27, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Exactly! Well said. I love the house/germs analogy! Carcharoth 22:35, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikidemo are you being willfully dense? Why are you saying "without reference to copyright" when I just pointed out that the text does specifically focus itself on copyright, but I elided the chunk in parenthesis which does so and killed the links when I copied it over.

In any case the issue of trademarks is largely orthogonal to the issues of concern in the world of free content: by large trademark is effectively a form of consumer protection (preventing misrepresentation). We don't consider software to be non-free just because it remains illegal to commit murder using it.

It's some awfully fine arm-waving you're doing that about 'it doesn't matter ... it's lost in the noise' but that position is simply not substantiated by your argument. Finally your entire argument, even ignoring its other flaws, fails because there it fails to recognize that there is still value in working towards a goal even when achieving it in a hard absolute sense is very difficult.

The only way that there wouldn't be value to the world in us finding more free illustrations where it is possible is if they were already trivially available. Were they trivially available, we likely wouldn't have half the arguments we have here. --Gmaxwell 00:35, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

No, not dense, not orthogonal, and I meant what I said. Your responses is a bit touchy perhaps? The introduction you added to the policy last year is an editorial comment that indeed claims that we are clamping down on copyright specificaly so as to remove all legal restrictions generally. This misconception is widespread and the parenthetical comment does not clarify the situation logically or in practice. If "Free content" means what it says it means, i.e. "having no significant legal restriction relative to people's freedom to use, redistribute, and produce modified versions", that goal is an unrealizable ideal, and copyright only takes you so far. If we are to admit it, that content can never be free of legal concerns but we are simply working on copyright, the discussion gets clearer but the problem remains that no site, particularly not a user submitted content site, can achieve anything close to complete compliance and that after a certain point extra effort does not yield better results. This is not a pie in the sky argument. As a practicing attorney in this field of law, if I represented a client considering re-using Wikipedia content I would tell them to draw no inferences from the fair use rationales or Wikipedia policies, and to assess the legality of each image afresh. I see no way that the image deletion and tagging policy, if fully carried out, would change that recommendation or make the job of reusing the content substantially easier. Hence my comment that after a certain point trying to root out improper images is chasing phantoms. Policies affecting millions of people are best carried out with a sense of perspective, not a false promise of perfection.Wikidemo 01:31, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

You do realize that you're continuing to make a claim which is patently untrue? I'm not being touchy I just honestly can't figure out what is confusing you. The policy specifically states that it is talking about copyright related restrictions. Furthermore, the policy of the Wikimedia foundation with respect to the importance of free content is quite specific that it is concerned with copyrighted related restrictions.

If you want to have an argument over how trademark, personality rights, and other non-copyright aspects of law interact with Free content, I'd be glad to... but it's an old argument that long predates Wikipedia and it is one that is usually considered fairly settled. This isn't the right location for that argument.

This isn't the first time I've seen you pound on your claim of legal credentials. Arguments from authority are fundamentally weak. It would be more productive to pick a different approach. I hope I don't need to make this point to you again in the future.

It should be obvious to everyone that you need to do your own legwork to verify the legal status of works to get from Wikipedia, no one should need professional advice to know that... and we tell people as much. This does not in any way remove the benefit that we provide to the public, while the verification effort remains we can certainly influence the result. Or are you actually claiming that the copyright related restrictions for most applications on most 'found content' are insubstantial compared to the trademark and personality rights related restrictions? This is also why providing good documentation and contact information for the copyright holders of our freely licensed content gets a substantial amount of energy as well. --Gmaxwell 02:18, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Yikes, a few stray comments there: "wilfully dense," "pound your credentials," unproductive, "I hope I don't have to make this point to you again."

The introduction clearly makes the claim that by addressing copyright concerns, a larger goal beyond copyright may be accomplished, that of free content more generally. People are indeed confused and I stand by my statement that this conceptual error leads to people to false expectations about what a restrictive copyright policy can achieve. If you insist on arguing the point I'll break your sentence down for you:

"The primary goal of Wikipedia's policy for non-free content..."

("non-free content" defined in later parenthetical as "copyrighted material lacking a free content license") <- so far so good, it is a policy about copyrighted content

"is to protect our mission to produce content that is perpetually free for unlimited distribution" <- makes claim about legality that is not restricted to copyright law

(actual Wikimedia Mission Statement links to page defining "free" as ""having no significant legal restriction relative to people's freedom to use...") <- again, not limited to copyright

I agree that good documentation is a crucial step. So is good record-keeping and data management, something that is not being done in any systematic way here beyond the copyright license tags. I'm not arguing against the effort to track and police copyrighted images, just saying people are sometimes on the wrong track on how that gets done -- Wikidemo 02:52, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

(ec) Interestingly, I see it was Gmaxwell who added that preamble [13]. I don't think it's true. I don't think "completely disallowing all material that is not free" is at all the best way to encourage production of "content that is perpetually free". It seems an extraordinary assertion. I put it to you that the current arragements, allowing appropriate fair use, are much more likely to bring people to WP and encourage them to add more free content. Jheald 21:35, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but are you arguing that allowing the addition of non-free content encourages the addition of more free content? Because that seems completely counter-intuitive to me. howcheng {chat} 21:59, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Once you have put to one side replaceable fair use, I think the non-replaceable images are complimentary rather than rivalrous to the generation of new free content. The better WP is as a site, the more it will encourage people to join in. Jheald 22:03, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

OK, well this is a completely academic discussion at this point because nobody's "going German". howcheng {chat} 23:03, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I guess I did write the original version of it ages and ages ago but please don't pass it off as something that was recently added being used in an argument. While the wording has been changed around a bit since it was first written, that it reflects intent of the policy has never been a matter of dispute (I guess until here).

Why do you think our purpose in this regard would be anything but to avoid non-free or unlicensed materials where we can? --Gmaxwell 22:03, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

See para immediately above (22:03) -- Jheald 22:10, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, I like nutshell boxes, and I don't think they encourage people to stop reading any more than well intros do. For NFCC, maybe we could use:

--Abu badali ^(talk) 21:32, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, no surprises that that's your view. But then have you ever taken a less extreme position in an IfD than a single other user? Jheald 21:38, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

In the case it wasn't a rhetorical question, here, for instance. --Abu badali ^(talk) 01:06, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I thought that picture name looked familiar! :-) My arguments there were based on technical matters (compression artefacts). We both still wanted the picture used on Wikipedia, but weren't agreeing on which version should be used - the existing one, or a hypothetical "better" one that I was planning on uploading. The funny thing about the rationale on that picture is that it says: "To show this award winning photograph in discussions about the photograph itself (and never to illustrate the event it depicts)" - but it is currently being used in Elián González affair. Despite some brief commentary ("Alan Diaz took his famous picture (he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography)"), it is clear that the image is being used to illustrate the event. There is an extensive discussion of the event, but the Pulitzer Prize is never mentioned again. There would be a stronger case for using the image at Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography, but that has links to the Pulitzer Prize website instead. How about it, Abu, do you want to put Image:Inselian.jpg up for deletion because it is clearly contravening the terms of the fair use rationale that you provided?! Rhetorical question indeed. :-) Carcharoth 01:43, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

The view is about right. That Abu badali has a bizarre idea of when it's unavoidable is beside the point. Maybe

Obviously it's "always avoidable" - we could decline to make an encyclopaedia at all. WilyD 22:02, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

• The spirit seems to be to err on the side of caution, but I think that erring on the side of caution can be damaging. When there is a robust argument for keeping and using an image, erring on the side of caution weakens future arguments and leads us down a slippery slope. There is a current discussion going on about the overly restrictive blanket ban on images from stock photography libraries (Getty, Corbis, et al.). This is a simplistically worded blanket ban that fails to realise that stock photo libraries sell: (a) historic images that we are quite justified in using under fair-use; (b) free images that we can of course use anyway if we can get them from the free source (eg. NASA); (c) old images where the rights situation is as clear as mud (eg. here, original discussion here). When people spend a lot of time debating an image, it is sometimes clear that no-one knows what the right answer is, but it is clear that our use of the image is unlikely to be challenged (eg. the case here). In those cases, erring on the side of caution is damaging. It could lead to photos being deleted that we have articles about. This is another case in point - if no-one had made clear that this really is an iconic picture, then the image might have been deleted because people could do no better than ask "How is Einstein sticking out his tongue so remarkable that a picture of it qualifies under fair use?" - sure, the article and image rationale should have made this clearer, but erring on the side of caution in this case would have made it more difficult to communicate to the reader why a picture of Einstein sticking his tongue out became so iconic. For borderline cases, if you consistently err on the side of caution, the borderline will start to shift in the direction of that caution. It would be better to illustrate the borderline with examples, and be relatively consistent. That should be the spirit of the policy - consciously sticking to a position that is more restrictive than fair-use, but that still allows useful non-free content. Carcharoth 22:32, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
  • When there is a robust argument for keeping and using an image, then the image will be kept and used. The "erring on the side of caution" occurs when the use is questionable or borderline or when we're dealing with a suspect image. Because of the free content goals, it should be the case that the first instinct should be to deny the use of non-free content, unless an argument can be made why it's necessary. howcheng {chat} 23:09, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
    • Agreed. But people often confuse and mix the two. If there is robust fair-use argument, then doubts about whether something is free or not should not matter - we can simply mark it as "copyright status uncertain - being used here under fair use with this rationale". The argument should then focus on the rationale. Equally, if something is free, then the only arguments are over how to use the picture. Suspect image does not equal suspect rationale. Carcharoth 00:15, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
      • That would be in conflict with criteria 10 of this policy. Garion96 (talk) 14:49, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
        • Are you saying that if the copyright status of an image is uncertain, that we cannot use the picture under fair-use (or rather, under Wikipedia's more restrictive non-free criteria)? That makes sense in some ways, because it is difficult to fully evaluate the impact on an unknown copyright holder. But remember that this "uncertain status" category should apply to old pictures with a long history where the records either no longer exist, or are uncertain, and the dates (for expiration of copyright) are not known. I'm not saying we should assume such pictures are free, but I am saying that it should still be possible to use them under fair-use. I had a look around, and I found Template:Non-free unsure, which puts images in Category:Public domain unless fair use images. It says at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags/Comprehensive#Deprecated 2 that this tag is deprecated, though from the looks of the category (there are 622 images) it seems that no-one is quite sure what to do with these images (and people may still be adding images to this category). Before anyone goes and starts nominating them for deletion, can we discuss this, or at least find the old discussions on this topic? There are a lot of old images out there where copyright status is uncertain. That shouldn't stop us using fair-use rationales for them if they will improve an article. Carcharoth 15:53, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
          • And I see that the instructions at Template:Non-free unsure say (among other things) to use Template:Non-free fair use in instead. This seems disingeneous to me. If the copyright status of an image is genuinely uncertain, we shouldn't be claiming that we think it is copyrighted when in fact we don't know. Does anyone have a link to the discussion where Template:Non-free unsure was deprecated? Carcharoth 16:00, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Back to the spirit

So... after that other discussion, no one else has proposed an alternative to what the spirit of the policy is. I've still got, "Do not use non-free content unless absolutely necessary." howcheng {chat} 00:13, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

How about:

This is still more strict than I would like, but that's how I interpret the gist of the policy. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 01:13, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry but this is wrong. That reason why we renamed Wikipedia:Fair use criteria as Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria was exactly that not everything that is legally fair use is o.k. under our policy. We should incorporate nfcc#8 in the nutshell description. But also, I admit it's an improvement to the previous proposals in that it deals with third-part reusers. --Abu badali ^(talk) 02:11, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Please note the words "unquestionable" and "even if we were a for-profit organization". The way I worded this places us far within what we may legally do. WP:NFCC #8 (significance) plays right into this, even without being explicitly mentioned. To establish a strong claim of fair use significance must of course be established.

Even so, I realize that I have failed to mention the very important criteria #1. So, how about this:

—Remember the dot ^(talk) 02:35, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I probably couldn't make myself clear. Your nutshell does not covers the cases where it would be legal (for anyone) to use the image, but still it shouldn't be used on Wikipedia. I.e., our policy is stricter than law, but your nutshell isn't. --Abu badali ^(talk) 12:58, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

If you simplify it too much you miss things. I think we ought to stay as close to the licensing resolution as possible. There's a reasonableness and purpose caveat, so the real issue is "only when you cannot reasonably expect a free equivalent to exist or be created that fits the same educational purpose." "Unquestionably" is an odd sounding new standard that we don't use anywhere else and moreover, the distinction between commercial and noncommercial use is not closely related to for-profit versus nonprofit organizations. That suggests something more like:

- Wikidemo 02:56, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

The full policy and guidelines pages can explain the details. How about:

I changed "undoubtedly" to "clearly". I think we need some kind of a modifier in there to comply with the Foundation:Resolution:Licensing policy requirement of "Their use, with limited exception, should be to..." —Remember the dot ^(talk) 04:27, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

If there's going to be a "nutshell", please use the Board's well-thought-out language. WP is fundamentally based upon WP:Consensus (though we understand that occasionally there needs to be administrative directives involved, such as that of the Wikimedia Board of Directors). The word "reasonably" tends in general to work extremely well with the consensus process (e.g., as opposed to "Because X told you so, because it's for your own good"). If a tension between "consensus" and "because X told you so" is perceived by anyone here, I'd be willing to discuss further as my time permits. ... Kenosis 04:53, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

How about the problem with internationally recognized copyrighted symbols, such as the International Symbol of Access and International Symbol for Deafness? Consensus said one thing, an administrator said the foundation's licensing policy said something else. [14] [15]. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 05:20, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

There's no problem using the ISA in the article International Symbol of Access, as obviously it's an iconic and widely-recognized symbol, and when the full article is about that very symbol, one cannot possibly deny that it's appropriate to present it in that article. Where the trouble there came from is that it is copyrighted and nonfree, and was being used all over the place to denote handicapped accessibility. This is effectively "with permission" use, since its license permits that use but is not a free license. In this case, the image is replaceable by text ("wheelchair accessible") or several user-created images which were presented as an alternative which clearly indicated wheelchair accessibility graphically. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 06:00, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

You're not getting it..."by permission only" means that it is illegal for a downstream user to re-use the content. There is no such restriction on the ISA or ISD. Please, look beyond the words of the policy and see the meaning. When you do, it is clear that the restrictions on non-free content were not intended to prevent us from using content that is legal to use for both us and commercial downstream users. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 18:15, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

A lot of these nutshells are missing a vital point, we're not making these rules for legal reasons alone. -- Ned Scott 06:03, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

• Most of those nutshells miss the most vital part of all. That point is that our main mission should be to build an informative encyclopedia. We are pandering too much to the idea that it is our responsibility to make sure images here are usable for all possible downstream uses. An appropriate nutshell box would be:

This would (1) ensure all images are legal (2) give support for the idea of using a free image if it is as good or nearly as good as the copyrighted one (3) put quality of this encyclopedia ahead of obsessing over hypothetical downstream uses. Johntex\^talk 06:21, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Free images should be used even if they are not "nearly as good as the copyrighted one", as long as they serve the same encyclopedic purpose. The world already have good encyclopedias, we are here to create a good free encyclopedia. We allow ourselves to use non-free material only when it's unavoidable for discussing a given subject in a educative context. You may not like all the points in our mission, but you can't pretend they're not there. --Abu badali ^(talk) 12:58, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

No, if a free image is vastly inferior to a fair use image, and if the fair use image is legal, then we should use the fair use image.

The world may have good encyclopedia's, but we can be a better encyclopedia. With our breadth and currency, we can be the highest quality encyclopedia on the planet. Using more fair-use content aids in this mission.

We need to work together to change the policy on this. Wikipedia was not always so intolerant of fair use content. We need to work together to change policy on this. We need to take back our goal of being the world's best encyclopedia. That goal is being hampered by too much focus on re-usability. Johntex\^talk 22:34, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

We have two goals as per the mission statement, one to be a good encyclopedia and the other to produce free content. The world treasures us for the encyclopedia, not the free content. We are approximately the 10th biggest site on the Internet and the most substantial and widely used reference work ever created, and a very good encyclopedia - perhaps the most important in the history of the world. Meanwhile for free content, the data dump currently under way has an "ETA" of September 16, and does not say it will include images. In fact, no images have been released since May of this year, and even when they were few people used them. Are the images shut down for good? Even the text content is kludgy and not widely used compared to our encyclopedia. Answers.com, for instance, does not use the images. Although I can see some value in staying true to the free content ideal, it is entirely pie in the sky at the moment, and it is folly to let that overwhelm the other primary mission. Wikidemo 23:33, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

IMO, the "International Symbol" examples linked above have nothing to do with the proposed "nutshell". IMO, if there's going to be a "nutshell", it needs to include both respect for the authority of the Board (which is what I meant by administrative authority) and a respect for WP:consensus, which includes the 1000+ admins on WP. The Board calls the shots here-- call that administrative authority for starters. And evidently being a WP administrator has virtually nothing to do with the proposed formation of a nutshell, among the possible manifestations of which are such statements as the following:

• "Don't use non-free material unless it's legal and completely unavoidable" ;
• "Do not use any unfree material unless it is an unavoidable part of making an encyclopaedia"' ;
• "Use non-free content only when its legality would be unquestionable even if we were a for-profit organization." ;
• "Use non-free content only when no free equivalent could be created, and even then only when using the non-free content would be undoubtedly legal even if we were a for-profit organization." ; and
• "Use non-free content only when no free equivalent exists or could be created, and then only when using the content is clearly legal for both us and downstream commercial re-users." .

None of the examples already proposed use the Board's administratively justified language wrt NFCC. Conspicuously missing at the moment are proposals that take into account what the Board has said about the issue, for example:

• "Use non-free content only where, by WP:Consensus, it cannot reasonably be expected that someone will upload an equivalent freely-licensed image that will serve the same encyclopedic purpose."

And I notice that Wikidemo's proposal does use the Board's language:

• • "Use non-free content only where you cannot reasonably expect that a free equivalent exists or could be created to fit the same educational purpose, where it is legal for us, and where downstream re-users may use the content, commercially or otherwise, free of significant copyright restrictions."

But all of them attempt to impose an adminstrative policy upon WP users "in a nutshell", all without adminstrative warrant and all in an attempt to more strictly prohibit NFCC than the Board has indicated, at least IMO. I would suggest that it would be wise to withhold placing a nutshell at least until September or later, after more of the WP participants have gotten back to work on the project they care so much about. Offhand, I would at least like to see the local considerations here headed in a direction that pays closer attention to the Board's directions with respect to NFCC/EDPs. ... Kenosis 06:31, 7 August 2007 (UTC) ... Offhand, I think Johntex's proposal comes closer to a presentation that balances the need for a competent modern encyclopedic presentation with the need to comply with copyright law and to take into account the almost endless possible manifestations of present-day copyright law. ... Kenosis 06:51, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

The nutshell would not replace the policy. Rather, it would explain the basic reasoning behind the policy. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 18:15, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

The restriction on fair-use content is 100% for legal reasons alone and we should not forget that. If content were freely usable without copyright law we would have no reason for the policy. The only reason we go beyond the US law as it applies to the Wikipedia articles is that the content may be used outside of the US, by parties other than Wikipedia, and in modified form. The whole point of the exercise is to balance our goal of creating a good encyclopedia with our other goal of allowing these other users to have the content with a minimum of legal worries. No issue is at stake there other than the law. Wikidemo 07:06, 7 August 2007 (UTC)::

One thing that's for sure about the law, worldwide AFAIK, is that a claim of copyright requires someone to publicly step forward and claim the exlusive copyright, or if not exclusive as to the original phtograph, to claim copyright of a particular enhancement or modification of the image. Modern copyright law in the "age of the Internet" has many provisions for people who misrepresent the copyright status of images by making the claimant "mysteriously disappear" when they copy and paste the image, or by claiming to have snapped a photograph that someone else in fact "snapped" it--even up to criminal penalties for such misrepresentations. But all of these laws, AFAIK, require notice to the effect that "hey, that's my photograph' I took that on my own camera (or was hired to take the pic by X)". Without a public disclosure of authorship (meaning, e.g., "I, Person X, took that photograph") upon publishing the photo, there's no copyright. If anything is 100% in copyright law, it's that even if you register your claim in the copyright office of your US or EU nation, you still are obliged to tell the rest of us in the world that you are claiming rights to it, ordinarily, at least, by attaching your name or the name of the company you work for on or in direct connection with the image. Y'can't just put it out there and willy-nilly decide to sue later to get money out of it, at least not without notifying other people in the world that some particular person or corporate entity claims to be the author of the photo or publicly claims to have bought the photo from the photographer or hired the photographer under contract for exclusive rights to all reproduction of the photo. Whoever or whatever entity publishes it must dislose that they claim a copyright of some kind, whether exclusive for all reproductions or for a particular enhancement or other claimed "right". The rest of the extremely complex analysis, I feel absolutely sure, can wait for another day. ... Kenosis 08:00, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

It's not just for downstream users, but also encouragement to make free content and to discourage dependancy on non-free content. -- Ned Scott 07:09, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

I'll take a stab at this. This is how I would describe our policy:

-- Ned Scott 07:11, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

The problem is that that "nutshell" says nothing meaningful about the policy. Of course policy requirements must be met whenever we include content, whatever kind of policy it may be. The "nutshell" should explain the basic reasoning behind the policy. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 18:15, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

OK, a lot of interesting points raised, but I fear that many of the suggestions focus too much on the replaceability of the content and not enough on the significance. After a night of thought, let me try synthesizing the two:

How do we like that? howcheng {chat} 18:39, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

... Kenosis 20:20, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

There's two problems I see with this last suggestion. First, it essentially says "look at WP:NFCC" rather than explaining the spirit of the policy. Second, whether someone will upload a free equivalent is not a good standard. Maybe someone will...but how long is a reasonable time to wait? A better word would be "could" rather than "will".

I still maintain that the policy ought to be based on our legal obligations, rather than a mindless application of rules or a desire to purify the wiki by deleting large quantities of legally acceptable non-free content. The "policy in a nutshell" should reflect this. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 21:33, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

What did the Board mean when it said "An EDP may not allow material where we can reasonably expect someone to upload a freely licensed file for the same purpose" ? Why would they choose to use this language? Does this policy really need a "nutshell"? Given the wide range of variations proposed above and the complicated nature of the NFCC, would a nushell be helpful at all, given that there's already a introductory lead section? Shouldn't a "nutshell" give the unfamiliar reader a realistic perspective on what they're about to encounter in this realm of NFCC? ... Kenosis 21:49, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

This is not what the policy is and thus, the nutshell should not say this. Not every thing that's legal is welcome in Wikipedia. --Abu badali ^(talk) 22:00, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

And that is part of what needs to change. The Foundation's statement on fair-use and free content does not enjoy consensus support. To the contrary, it flies in the face of what most members of the community (editors, but especially the readers) would like to see. Our audience is better served by more fair use content. Our policies should be better reflecting that. The Foundation Board should be working to meet the needs of the community rather than the community trying to find a way to work within an edict from the board. Johntex\^talk 22:38, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

And that's completely beside the point. If you have an issue with the Foundation resolution, then you need to take it up with them, but we have no choice but to comply with it here. howcheng {chat} 22:51, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

If we think the Board has gone the wrong direction, that's certainly worth talking about here on Wikipedia. We elect the Board, we use the product, and we are the volunteer work force that allows it all to happen. We're definitely stakeholders, and the electorate should always have a healthy discussion of the rules its leaders want to impose. Moreover, some dissent within the ranks is a perfectly healthy response to unwanted rules. However, we have to separate the discussion of what the rules should be from how to comply with the roles as they now exist. There is another discussion, which is that some people here are going beyond the Board's stated policy. The Board says we are balancing two primary goals, encyclopedic value and free content. Like it or not that's their position. Some people go beyond that and give free content primacy over encyclopedic content, and seem to advocate eliminating images merely for the sake of eliminated images, even non-free images that will never cary legal restrictions for anyone and are therefore not even in tension with the free content goal. It's as if the cheerleaders want to score more points than the coach. Wikidemo 23:47, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Abu, please pardon me. I once again forgot to mention WP:NFCC #1, which I do support. Once it is established that no free equivalent could be created, the policy should focus on our legal obligations. Granted, we want to stay clearly within these obligations, and so the policy may be more strict than legally required. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 22:47, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, right now #1 has some quirks in it that IMO ought be discussed and resolved come September when more users get involved again. One of those quirks is the use of the phrase "... or could be created... ", which tends to invite unnecessarily subjective discussion about what's meant by "could be created". By contrast, the language of the Board ("Use non-free content only where it cannot reasonably be expected that someone will upload an equivalent freely-licensed content that will serve the same encyclopedic purpose." ) provides a somewhat more specific basis for arriving at consensus on a case-by-case basis. The case-by-case arguments are thus directed to revolve around the question "Can it reasonably be expected that someone will upload an equivalent freely-licensed content that will serve the same encyclopedic purpose?"
........ Another significant quirk is the following statement: "(As a quick test, ask yourself: "Can this image be replaced by a different one, while still having the same effect?" If the answer is yes, then the image probably does not meet this criterion.)" The request to ask one's self the question is fairly irrelevant advice that would have a tendency for someone who likes a particular "non-free" file to answer it with an immediate "No, it can't". Surely this can be written better than it presently is written. For one thing, "replaced by a different one" is just plain sloppy writing IMO, because "a different one" could be anything. I think this phrase intended to say something like "replaced by a file that has an explicit free license or which is in the public domain", or something to that effect. For another thing about that parenthetized sentence, the words "Ask yourself the question [whether you think your image meets the required standard]" is fairly irrelevant. Ultimately, these issues will be decided not by the uploader, but by consensus, possibly in an IfD, using the NFCC and other applicable criteria such as the EU and US copyright basics (the links to which have already been cited several times above on this page -- the Cornell synopsis and the text of the EU convention, for instance). I feel sure that any other quirks in #1 can readily be figured out with further attention and discussion. ... Kenosis 23:43, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

The problem here is that we can't easily summarize the policy. The nutshell is not meant to summarize the entire thing, but simply explain what the page is going to talk about (hence my suggestion, which simply explained that we sometimes allow non-free, but doesn't really dive into the how and why). In other words, the nutshell should not be seen as a crash corse for the policy, but an explanation of what the policy page is going to be about. -- Ned Scott 03:45, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Nutshell vs. spirit

I think we have two different conversations going on here. Ned Scott is right in that the nutshell probably shouldn't talk about the spirit of the policy, so I would propose something like:

That truly is a nutshell of the policy. However, I would still like to refocus and determine what exactly is the spirit of the policy. Are we trying to eliminate unnecessary non-free content as much as possible (my feel)? Or something else entirely? As someone said earlier, the spirit of the policy should be why we have this here. howcheng {chat} 03:14, 9 August 2007 (UTC)