Template talk:Fair use reduced

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[edit] No, please!

Consider Image:Marilyn Manson Mechanical Animals.jpg, where a 400x400 version was replaced with a 250x250 thumbnail. 250px is fine for display on computer screens, but what about the possible print version of Wikipedia? On paper, you'd want way more than 400px to make the image not look grainy. As far as I know, an album cover is going to be fair use regardless of the resolution. The only type of image where resolution could affect fair use is an artwork or photograph where the author expects to sell the full-resolution work (and so providing a high resolution version here would cause financial harm). The vast majority of Wikipedia's fair use images don't fall under this category. Has there been any discussion about this template anywhere? I think I'll go edit it ... User:dbenbenn 15:04, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, take a look at Wikipedia:Fair use criteria #3. I'm not at all clear that we should be web-publishing print-resolution images that belong to other parties. de:'s print run didn't have any unfree material in it, as far as I know. All of that said, I doubt that I would notice that an album cover was 400x400px, but I have replaced what appeared to be homemade scans of vinyl jackets with smaller images. Jkelly 15:23, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

400px X 400px is small enough to not really be an issue, IMO (at 300 dpi it would only be a little over an inch by an inch). What we usually mean by "high resolution" is "capable of being a replacement for a print version". In the case of an album, for example, we would not want to provide replacement sleeves for people who burn CD copies of albums. This is not strictly within the fair use clause of the US law, of course, but aiding in piracy of materials can be a charge, I am fairly sure, and in any case we are far less likely to induce any ire with people if we restrict our "fair use" to screen-res images. Again, I think in the case you mentioned the reduction from 400 to 250 did not substantially change anything legally or practically and was unnecessary. But something which is between 200-300 dpi of its print-resolution size would be problematic, I think, as a rule of thumb. --Fastfission 15:49, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

dbenbenn, your complaint doesn't seem to be with this template, but with the size of fair use images. That's a debatable topic, but a good rule to keep in mind is that the images should be large enough to depict the subject, but small enough to be of degraded quality.

I actually think this template is a good idea--I've seen some pretty high-res images claimed as fair use. The template just needs to be used by people who know what they're doing. ~MDD4696 03:44, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. Fastfission, you pointed out #3 on Wikipedia:Fair use criteria, which says "The amount of copyrighted work used should be as little as possible." Obviously this point isn't to be taken literally, because "as little as possile" = none. We are never required to have any non-free content here. So it's not really clear what #3 is intended to mean. User:dbenbenn 06:17, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

"As little as possible" is a reference to the fact that one of the fair use criteria in the copyright law has to do with amount of copyrighted material used. It is hard to know exactly how that applies in the case of digital images (usually it means amount of text take from the total textual work -- so 100% of a poem is far worse than 5% of a Russian novel even though the latter may be much longer in terms of physical size). In terms of our policy, it generally means, as I understand it, that one should not use more fair use material than is necessary for the purposes of Wikipedia. In images this can be reflect both in the number of images used as well as the size of them. The overall goal is that we don't want anybody to think that they'd have a good court case against us -- sueing us over a 400 px image is hopefully not going to be worth their time. --Fastfission 02:06, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

We should limit the size of fair use but not assume that no one else will sue us.--Jusjih 11:43, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] consensus on size limit

Is it possibe to obtain a broad consensus on the size limit before enforcing some arbitrary, personnal and fluctuent ones? The day there will be a jursiprudence on what exact image size is fair use, wikipedia could resize all the images by a bot. --Marc Lacoste 17:17, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Automatic tagging

Would there be any way to automatically create a list or category for images being used under fair use that have a size above some threshold? That way, it could be much easier to identify images that may need to be scaled down (though not automatically since I'm sure there are exceptions). —ShadowHalo 01:02, 12 January 2007 (UTC)