Free the unfree for a fee

So Wikipedia has started to crack down on fair use. Why would WP not want to use fair-use images? And what's with not allowing CC no commercial use licences...

Ah. There it is. The second is easily answered. If the content is not "free", it can't easily be sold. Couple this with the recent whining about lack of money and a conspiracy theorist might conclude that WP is going to be profiting from its content (more than it already does) some time soon.

The first is less obvious. One's first instinct is to put it down to the people involved just being fucking idiots and none too cluey on the law. (WP's lawyer generally takes a pronounce-and-pray approach to tricky legal areas: claim something is legal and then pray that it is.) Then it strikes you. Use a picture of someone's album cover and they might contest your "fair use". You're not going to get sued while you are a "free educational resource" (the copyright law would more or less Wikipedia as it stands) but you just might if you are making a ton of dosh from it.

I note that Mel Etitis, an editor whom I generally consider to be FOS, hit the nail resoundingly on the head:

Could someone explain to me it's so important that people be able to use Wikipedia's contents commercially that we can't use fair-use images in the way for which they're intended (i.e., fair use)? All the work that editors put in to this project for free, on the basis that this is a free encyclopædia, is to be judged by whether someone else can make money out of it? Does anybody else feel their stomach churning at this? --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 12:48, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

I note that he is quickly shouted down, the fate of most common sense on the wiki.

I noted also that the pompous fart who goes by the moniker Just zis Guy (I'm not kidding; he really chose that for his nym) whines that noobs have to have fair use explained several times before they get it, if they ever do get it. This is nonsense. What you get from Guy is bullied if you don't agree with his particular reading of a law he doesn't understand himself. Ah well, arrogance dressed up as informedness is the stock currency of the wiki. I stopped reading at that point because a/ I was bored and b/ there was no prospect of becoming in any way enlightened by further reading.

Anyway, it's given a couple of the more excitable shitheads something to do: now they have a new way to upset lots of contributors. Glee!

posted by Dr Zen @ 3:00 pm