User:Durin/Fair use miscellany

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This is a repository of material related to fair use and Wikipiedia.

Contents

[edit] Discussion

[edit] Other editors who have made similar removals

[edit] Related ArbCom cases

In May of 2006, ArbCom ruled that fair use images may not be used in userspace. See Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Locke_Cole/Proposed_decision#Fair_use.

[edit] Work completed

  • Went through all entries in Category:Wikipedians by alma mater: United States to check for existence of fair use images in any of those categories. Found four fair use violations. 22 May 2006
  • Went through each and every userbox beginning with Template:User A and Template:User a, running through Z and z. Took approximately two months to complete. 25 May 2006. Also went through Template:User 0-9, and \,=,: and - 26 May 2006.
  • Went through the surprisingly small Category:Band logos, finding just a four violations. 9 June 2006
  • Went through Category:Automobile manufacturer logos, finding a number of violations. 18 July 2006
  • Went through Category:GameCube game covers, finding four violations. Found four orphaned fair use images tagged as such for greater than seven days as well. 7 August 2006
  • User H*: 0 of 131, 18 August 2006
  • User h*: 1 of 179, 18 August 2006
  • User I*: 3 of 179, 3 August 2006
  • User J*: 0 of 65, 3 August 2006
  • User K*: 1 of 79, 3 August 2006
  • User L*: 4 of 160, 4 August 2006
  • User M*: 6 of 294, 4 August 2006
  • User N*: 5 of 401, 4 August 2006
  • User O*: 3 of 105, 7 August 2006
  • User P*: 3 of 281, 7 August 2006
  • User Q*: 2 of 32, 8 August 2006
  • User R*: 3 of 162, 8 August 2006
  • User S*: 7 of 428, 9 August 2006
  • User T*: 2 of 167, 9 August 2006
  • User U*: 9 of 233, 10 August 2006
  • User V*: 2 of 65, 10 August 2006
  • User W*: 5 of 531, 14 August 2006
  • User X*: 0 of 8, 15 August 2006
  • User x*: 0 of 43, 15 August 2006
  • User Y*: 0 of 30, 18 August 2006
  • User y*: 0 of 25, 18 August 2006
  • User Z*: 2 of 15, 13 August 2006
  • User z*: 0 of 87, 13 August 2006
  • Went through all 67 counties of Florida and removed fair use violating seals from most of them. Also re-tagged a number of the images from {{coatofarms}} to {{seal}}. 22 August 2006
  • User A*: 3 of 333, 25 November 2006

[edit] Userboxes

As of 7 August 2006, I've removed 519 fair use images from userboxes. As of today, there are 10,043 userboxes. Thus, (very) approximately 5% of userboxes have, at one time or another, contained fair use image violations. That is only the fair use image violations that I have removed; this figure does not include all the removals that others have done. While this might not seem a significant problem on the surface (5% is, afterall, a single digit percentage) it is actually quite significant. If 5% of our articles contained copyright violations then 65,000 articles would have copyright problems. That would be immense problem. Userboxes continue to grow rapidly. Over the last month, approximately 1,000 new userboxes were added. This is a net value as quite a number of userboxes have been moved out of template space. I am beginning to be of the mind that userboxes are too much of a haven of copyright problems with respect to their worth to the project. They add nothing to the encyclopedic value of this project, which in the end is the only metric against we can measure ourselves. Related to this; Jimbo said this. That was in relation to belief based userboxes.

Looking at 5000 edits to the template space spanning August 4 to August 7 of 2006, edits to userboxes account for ~5% of those edits. Yet, those 5% accounted for 50% of the edits where there was a fair use image violation removal. Of course, that could be skewed somewhat by editors targeting userboxes over other template types.

[edit] Fair use on portals

There's been some discussion on this. See:

Also, this was conclusive against use of fair use images in portals:

Further, a word from Brad Patrick, Wikipedia staff lawyer against their inclusion:

In short, fair use images on portals are not permitted at this time. There's substantial disagreement with that, but the policy has not changed to specifically permit it (arguments that "portal" isn't mentioned in WP:FUC #9 not withstanding).

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