User talk:Chick Bowen/Bad book covers

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The footnote: you don't have to rely on my word. You could also point to WP:PD. (Although essentially written by me, it is seen by many other other people, and so far nobody has found the treatment there to be grossly erroneous.) Lupo 09:32, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

True enough, but you're so much more concise. But yes, I will link there. But actually it's commons policy that I find confusing more than ours. Chick Bowen 17:07, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, you could add "See also WP:PD#_note-US1909" or some such. That links directly to the footnote, which I have modified to be essentially the same as the comment I made. Yes, the commons policy in confusing. Officially, they claim to require "PD in source country + PD in the U.S.", but this isn't followed in practice. If the source country in a 70y p.m.a. country, the de facto rule over there appears to be just "PD in source country". But if something isn't PD in the source country, it cannot be uploaded even if it is PD in the U.S. (That, at least, makes sense. Such works should be uploaded locally here.) Lupo 07:59, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and Lupo, you mention the spine problem in one of the annotations--that's been bothering me as well (that affects all of the books from AABA). It seems to me that since the angle is straight-on it's hard to claim the visibility of spine as creative content (though whether it makes the pictures uglier is a different question--we could photoshop them). But I am very unsure. Chick Bowen 17:10, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

So am I. Lupo 07:59, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I took out the Vilette stuff, which was very 3D--I'll find something else. Perhaps we should rethink the images already uploaded for Green Mansions and The Invisible Man? I think all of the others should be all right. Chick Bowen 15:54, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, to be on the safe side, we should try to find other images for these two. The creativity in arranging a book like in these two pictures is IMO only very minor, but it may be sufficient to make the images more than just "reproductive" and thus they may not fall under the Bridgeman reasoning... I'm not sure about this one I listed for She: the fold is visible. What do you think? Lupo 16:54, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Frankly, why even bother with the legal hair-splitting? Why not just make a fair-use claim for a photo of a first edition cover under the Wikipedia book-cover exception? See the language I put into the Washington Square image for an example. This simply sideteps all the tangled legalities of whether recent photos of old book covers are free-use or not. Yes, it would mean that the images couldn't be used on some non-English Wikipedias which don't allow fair use. But it straightens out the situation on the English Wikipedia with no muss or fuss.

The real advantage is to have an image of a first edition, which I agree is more "encyclopedic". (Though I disagree with the knock on Penguin, which does yeoman work in publishing classic literature.) There's no advantage at all, at least on the English Wikipedia, in claiming free use as opposed to fair use. So why bother with the excruciating technicalities? Just post the image on the English Wikipedia under the fair-use exception for book covers, and avoid all the quibbles. Casey Abell 16:44, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

There's no advantage at all? Casey, I must disagree with this in the strongest possible terms. All of the books on the list are in violation of the replaceable cause of the fair use policy. Since free images should theoretically be available, every single one should be replaced if possible. It's not legal hair-splitting, it's what we are--the free encyclopedia. Chick Bowen 16:48, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I agree with Chick. Where copyright-free images can be found, they should be used and replace fair use images. Any debate about that should be held over at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Fair use. Lupo 16:54, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

This is the kind of wikilawyering that frankly bores me. I'm way too exo for this stuff, and this will be my last comment in the discussion. But I have to point out that you're assuming what's in contention - that recent photos or scans of old book covers are, in fact, free-use images. My guess is that you could get copyright lawyers to argue both sides in specific cases, for just short of forever. At any rate, I didn't want to get blocked for claiming free use for an image that may arguably not be free, so I put the fair-use disclaimer into the Washington Square image. Frankly, I think you should put a similar disclaimer on all the book cover images you upload, just to be on the safe side, unless the photos were made a long time ago. Also, I wouldn't upload them to Commons unless they are absolutely rock-solid free-use, which seems at least debatable in at least some cases. Anyway, good luck on getting free-use (and I mean indisputably, absolutely, no-two-ways-about-it, even-lawyers-couldn't-argue free use) images of first edition covers to replace fair-use images of more recent editions. Casey Abell 17:41, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Some of them are indeed questionable, but most--simple scans--are not; they're clearly covered by Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. This isn't wikilawyering; it's just law. Chick Bowen 18:31, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I'm breaking my promise about the "last comment". But...really? Let's say you're a museum or a library with some rare first editions. Your people put a lot of hard work into carefully scanning (or photographing) the covers and producing high-quality images for the web that reproduce every detail of the old artwork and bindings. And along come some Wikipedians who say: "Sorry, you got no copyright, these images are free, we can use them any which way we want, ha ha ha."

Well, maybe. IANAL blah blah blah. But it seems to me that it would be much more defensible (and frankly fairer to the people whose work went into the images and the institutions that own the first editions) to make a narrow, one-time claim of fair use solely to illustrate the book in question. Again, good luck on your project. Casey Abell 18:51, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, thanks for that last, and thanks again for your help with the James cover. As for the fair use claim, this is really not the place for that conversation--what you're proposing would require a major policy change. Chick Bowen 19:38, 5 December 2006 (UTC)