WikiProject Fair use seeks to aid the English Wikipedia by improving and monitoring its invocation of the "fair use" clause of U.S. copyright law towards the use of copyrighted media, with the goal of preventing unnecessary and inappropriate copyright infringement, which could potentially cause all sorts of legal trouble for our beloved encyclopedia.

Goals[edit]

Current Goals for March 2012:

Previous activity[edit]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
This section describes the situation as of early August 2005, before the adoption of the current WP:NFC policy framework in August–October 2005. Since then, the aspirations set out in this section have all largely been achieved

The current guidelines for non-free content on Wikipedia, though written about at length on various project pages, does not seem to translate well into actual practice: many images are labeled as "fair use" without any deliberation, and many such images labeled would probably not be judged as "fair use" in a court of law.[citation needed] As of August 2005, the English Wikipedia has over 14,000 images tagged as "fair use", and if even a small percentage of those are copyright violations, the consequences could be unpleasant.

The goals of the policy reform are as follows:

  1. The tags should be more detailed, stating the rationale for fair use and implicitly defining what is and what is not fair use.
  2. They should be comprehensible to the average Wikipedian who neither knows nor cares much about the structure of U.S. copyright law.
  3. They should emphasize use and not medium.
  4. They should allow anyone who cares to help monitor proper use to quickly judge whether or not the use is "fair" or if it is copyright infringement.
  5. It should be noted (if not on the tags, then somewhere else) that it is best to use a free alternative if one is available. This is not strictly a requirement of "fair use", but the avoidance of a potential copyright situation is always better for the goals of Wikipedia (both in avoiding lawsuits, as well as creating a "free encyclopedia").
  6. Where appropriate, separate tags should be created for common "fair uses", such as using a book cover to illustrate an article about said book.
  7. They should clearly state that the work in question is copyrighted, and require the user to label the copyright source as best as is known.
  8. They should clarify that U.S. copyright law matters in particular because the images are hosted on a U.S. servers.
  9. They should provide reusers with information to help them decide whether their use is "fair" or not. A large part of our invocation of "fair use" is because our site is educational in purpose and run by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and that our invocation of "fair use" for our use of the image might not apply to other uses (that is, third parties can't "piggyback" on our "fair use" claims). Where practical, they should also provide information on other conditions under which the image may be redistributed or information on obtaining a licence to redistribute it.
  10. Elimination of blanket "fair use" tags which have no applicability towards "use" which is different than a generic "fair use" tag.
  1. The use of specialized templates to indicate when an image has or has not been reviewed by another Wikipedian (associated with this project or not).

Fair use should also be reviewed in featured articles.

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Sub-pages[edit]

These pages were for working on specific goals. Many have now been achieved.

Useful templates[edit]

Useful tags[edit]

Review tags:

Image changing:

Deletion tags:

Useful external resources[edit]

Participants[edit]

Userbox

Participants may add this to their userpage.

Code:Results in:
((User WPFU))
This user is part of the Fair use WikiProject.

If you prefer not to use userboxes, you may add yourself directly to Category:WikiProject Fair use participants by placing the following code on your Userpage: [[Category:WikiProject Fair use participants|((PAGENAME))]]

If you'd like to be kept abreast of proposals and decisions, please add your name below. At this early stage, none of the above ideas have been implemented in a major way, but will be discussed on the talk page of this project. Feel free to add this page to your watchlist if you'd like to keep up with the smaller changes.

Editors willing to help[edit]

-- ۩ Mask 23:47, 23 June 2011 (UTC)Reply[reply]

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