Image talk:RNZAF P3.jpg

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[edit] Proposed Deletion

• I would vote against deletion as:

1. this is the only available illustration of his ice runway and the basing of a P3 in Antarctica, which is significant for fisheries protection and New Zealand's capabilities within the Ross Dependency. No other image of this event is available or will become available, as Crown copyright extends to all images taken by service personnel in the course of their duties, all people involved were service personnel.

2. I also suggest NZ (and other Commonwealth) Crown Copyright should face a low hurdle for acceptance under fair use, as;
a. free reproduction is allowed, the only limitations being that acknowledgement of copyright be made, and that the image is not altered in such a way that it deliberately misleads - liability only extending to Wikipedia if it conducts either of those two activities, not if another person uses the image from Wikipedia to do so.
b. No complaints have been made by the Crown in relation to quite extensive reproduction of Crown Copyright images on Wikipedia, and objections to them are more due to ideological puritanism rather than any real threat to Wikipedia or any inconvience to users.
c. The fair use rational is based on American law and discriminates against non-US images, contributing to the already significant tendency for US source material bias on Wikipedia. Fair Use policy provides no legal protection outside the US nor absolute protection within the US for breaching other nations intellectual property laws, meaning the policy is fundamentally flawed in dealing with images about non-US matters.
d. The only inconvenience that could arise is to a user who wished to download the picture and alter it in order to mislead a third party. In the unlikely event such a user exists, it is difficult to see any moral reason to protect such a user's "right" to do so. I suggest enforcement of the "fair use" rule on Crown Copyright images is an exercise in rule enforcement for the sake of rule enforcement, forgetting the wider purposes of Wikipedia.
Given these policy shortcomings, the policy should, I suggest, be applied sparingly with the benefit of the doubt granted whenever plausible. Winstonwolfe 02:27, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't think that the image had been nominated for deletion - it was tagged as needing a free-use rationale. For some reason NZ Crown Copyright images have been ruled to be not sufficiently free to be used on Wikipedia without the same conditions as fully copyrighted images. This seems pretty silly to me. --Nick Dowling 03:52, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

Agreed - although Crown Copyright has different restrictions within different Commonwealth nations, this is not just a NZ issue either. I don't add Crown Copyright images myself, but occasionally get dragged into defending them as it bugs me they are often pointlessly deleted. I think the whole "fair use" policy is fundamentally flawed as it really is just lifting a US law, simplifying bits of it and calling it Wikipedia policy, in complete ignorance or disregard for other jurisdictions intellectual property law.

I've made a couple of attempts to engage Wikipedians over this in the past and run into 3 levels of argument - people who got in a "but Wiki policy says..." mind loop, the barely more sophisticated "but the servers are in the US" which is only tangentially relevant, and amongst those who do think more deeply about it, the realisation that the Orwellianly misnamed "free use" policy is not tenable under present international intellectual property laws, but unfortauntely they seem to regress into what I see as the completely unrealistic dream world reflex answers along the lines of, "so all other nations need to change their IP laws to the USA's enlightened approach" . Winstonwolfe 01:32, 13 November 2007 (UTC)