Wikipedia:Fair use/Amendment/Historical images

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The following is a proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process. The proposal may still be in development, under discussion, or in the process of gathering consensus for adoption. References or links to this page should not describe it as "policy".

A proposal's acceptance or rejection is not determined simply by counting votes.

This is a proposal to change the wording of the Wikipedia:Fair use criteria, to support the use of historical images which contribute significantly to articles by providing visual historical information about the subject that cannot be presented with text alone (deleted text in ~~strikeout~~, new text in bold):

"8. The material must contribute significantly to the article (e.g. identify the subject of an article, or specifically illustrate relevant points or sections within the text, or provide visual historical information about the subject that could not be adequately presented with text alone) and must not serve a purely decorative purpose."

Specifically, this is an amendment designed to clarify policy in such a way as to allow historical logos in image galleries, with appropriate captions, as fair use, but the proposed wording certainly could have other effects (and the proposed wording may not even have the desired effect, which means the wording of the amendment is as much up for discussion as the amendment itself).

However, it would seem that a simple change to the policy wording would be better to accomplish this goal than trying to carve out blanket policy exceptions for various classes of images, which would likely lead to instruction creep.

There has been an ongoing dispute at Wikipedia:WikiProject Television Stations about the use of fair use images, specifically historical logos, to illustrate television station articles. User:A Man In Black, an administrator, has been deleting galleries of logos from various television station articles over the last few months, and consistently and quickly reverts anyone who restores them, claiming they violate fair use policy. Discussion has been ongoing without resolution on WP:TVS, including here, here, and here, and at Wikipedia talk:Fair use/Historical logos in galleries.

Some people have expressed that these historical logo galleries do not currently violate the current fair use criteria, and it is intended that in this case this amendment shouldn't reflect an actual change in policy, but merely a clarification in the wording of policy that these logo galleries, which have been in long-standing usage on articles in WP:TVS under a de facto consensus, should be deemed acceptable under the fair use criteria.

However, to the extent that there are those who believe the historical logo galleries do violate existing policy, the intent of this amendment is to reword policy such that they do not.

1 Examples of usage
2 Arguments for and against
- 2.1 Arguments for
- 2.2 Arguments against
3 See also
4 Discussion

[edit] Examples of usage

Below are some examples of articles which had fair use image galleries in the past, but which have been stripped of those galleries under a claim of them violating fair use policy. (static versions are linked to; notice that most of the galleries are now missing images due to the removal of such galleries from article pages and the policy of deleting orphaned images after 7 days):

[edit] Arguments for and against

This is a very brief summary of the major arguments for and against the use of fair use historical logo images in galleries. Note that this is only intended to be an extremely brief summary, and all substantive development of arguments should be directed to this page's discussion page (though a brief summary of any arguments not covered here may be added).

[edit] Arguments for

Historical images contribute significantly to the quality of articles, that they provide relevant and encyclopedic information about the history of the subject in a way that cannot be adequately conveyed by text alone.
In the case of historical logos, they have been widely distributed by the copyright holder for the purpose of identifying a station, company, or product.
Such images would comply (or could easily be made compliant) with other fair use criteria, and most would be tagged (or could be easily tagged) with relevant templates (such as {{tv-logo}}) and would provide a rationale (or a rationale could easily be provided) on their description page.
These images would be used only when no free alternative can be made (e.g., a copyrighted logo, or an unrepeatable historical event).
With this change, FUC #3 would not violated because as generally as few images would be used as possible to convey the relevant visual historical information about the subject.
The images would only be used in where the historical information is specifically about the subject of the article itself, and not to illustrate other tagentially related articles.
The image captions in the galleries would identify the historical significance of the image (e.g. when a logo was used by the station) and occasionally contain more relevant information about specific images.
In case law, the use of images as historical artifacts to document and represent historical events has been held to be transformative and a fair use of images when the original purposes of the images were artistic expression and promotion. (Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley Limited, 448 F.3d 605 (2nd Cir. 2006).)

[edit] Arguments against

Image galleries are merely being used for decoration, and not for a valid fair use purpose (such as critical commentary).
Galleries would contain very little (if any) text and thus provide far less opportunity to properly establish fair use of the image.
Such images are often posted without source, and no fair-use rationale has been, or indeed can be, written for the vast majority of them.
There are far too many fair use images in Wikipedia, and encouraging the use of fair use image galleries hinders the goal of making Wikipedia a free-content encyclopedia.