This post is fair use under the “I wanna” clause of US copyright law.

I’m a staunch defender of fair use on the English Wikipedia: talking about things requires being able to quote them, and that applies as much to images as to text.

To this end, I’ve been removing a lot of the ridiculous abuses. Orphaning and later deleting a lot of fair abuse — one screenshot is fair use, ten is taking the piss and “fair use” galleries violate copyright, not just policy — not to mention resizing. No, you don’t need a 1500×1000 PNG for a 200×300 thumbnail. I need a bot to resize high-resolution fair abuse.

Today’s grand missing the point was {{User no GFDL}}, whose text was: “This user would prefer not to use free images if there are better fair use ones available.” And never mind little details like the Wikimedia Foundation licensing policy and mission statement. Here’s the deletion discussion, before I came to my senses and zapped the horrible thing, the comment on my talk from its aggrieved creator and the ensuing deletion review.

Perhaps I should be sweeter and fluffier to people, but I find myself unable to rightly apprehend the confusion of ideas involved. How to get someone from there to here in less than geological time?

2 thoughts on “This post is fair use under the “I wanna” clause of US copyright law.”

  1. “How to get someone from there to here in less than geological time?” Since sorting these issues out seems to require large amounts of discussion, the wisdom gained from community discussions of issues such as image use rules should be easy to find in wiki policy pages. However, rather than craft policy pages that function efficiently as learning resources and serve to educate wiki users, we have wiki lawyers who continually seek to turn policy pages into ambiguous and watered-down clumps of legalese that provide little in the way of guidance that is useful and meaningful to most wiki participants. Policy pages should be full of good examples that show how to apply the policies and promote efforts to make a high quality encyclopedia. We could benefit from a school where clueless editors can be sent for orientation and training in how to constructively edit.

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