Wikimedia Commons bans logos, CD covers, and more
by Gregory Kohs - for Examiner.com
November 6, 2010

thekohser's article is here.

Thanks, Dee-lish. I can't believe I actually messed up one of my spam posts!

Will wikipedia enforce the policy retroactive? There are a hell of a lot of band and album articles that have dvd, album, and logo images. There would be a big outcry over their removal.

Wikipedia having album covers is different than Commons having them. Theoretically, Commons is a repository of only free images, while en.wikipedia.org hosts fair use images only when the images are relevant and necessary to the related article. Theoretically.

Conflating copyright infringement and plagiarism?

Absolutely. If someone uploads a close-up photograph of a U2 album cover, cropping it so that only the album cover is seen in the frame, then lists it as "own work", that's both copyright infringement and plagiarism, is it not?

Sort of like someone can be convicted for reckless driving, driving under the influence, and manslaughter for essentially once incident.

If I'm way off base here, Zoloft, please elaborate. Feel free to do so on the Examiner article's comments field.

Dunno. It might be fair use.

A more appropriate question is whether or not what the (former) arb com members did was copyright infringement, in addition to plagiarism. I don't have any idea what the answer to that is, because I don't know the details of the plagiarism.

It's fair use if the image is low resolution and can't be used in a commercial manner. Which probably means that the mirrors who profit from Wikipedia pages containing fair use material are violating the law. Not that a few cents each click on an ad impression constitute a great commercial benefit...

That's their problem, really. The fair use tags are all machine readable and hence filterable, and it has been a while since I have seen any fair use image without such a tag. If they aren't filtering the image out, then that's their issue.

Are there actually commercial Wikipedia mirrors that fail to filter fair use images?

Sure. Answers.com has "fair use images" (*). There's nothing in the law which bans fair use from being commercial. In fact, pretty much every successful fair use court case I can think of has been over commercial use.

I have no idea what "Text" is talking about. Maybe it was sarcasm?

Maybe he got his understanding of "fair use" from Wikipedia.

(*) The very notion of "fair use images" is itself a misunderstanding spread by Wikipedia. Fair use is based on the use. There's no such thing as a "fair use image".

Damn straight. A responsible site would never use someone's logo without consent.

Anthony


I got it from Wikipedia, i had never heard the term before i started going to the english wikipedia. They are the ones that insist that the fair usage of an image can happen if the image is low in resolution and is used to strictly illustrate the topic of a page. They also say they only use fair use images when no free alternative comes up.

Oh, people hardly know the difference between the two anyway. A lot of popular media writers blend the two concepts together into one Slurpee. It's not a matter of being egregiously incorrect, it's just you might want to expand that part by a sentence or two to clarify.

I'll have to get my ArbCom to look into that.

Looking through those logos, they appear to mostly be old logos that have entered the Public Domain, or self-licensed into a free use license. Commons is fine for hosting them, unless there's another Ubi Soft situation with some of them.....

Edit: Actually, this I'm curious about: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ani..._Fink_Heavy.png Apparently it doesn't qualify for Copyright, but it is trademarked by Nintendo. Isn't using a Trademarked logo still "Fair use"?

The text is the trademark, not the logo; plain-text-plain-background can't be copyrighted unless the font itself is the creative work (and that just uses the standard Fink font). One couldn't use the words "Animal Crossing" on another videogame, as that would be breaching trademark, but trademarks only apply in the company's particular field of operations. Remember the lawyer's field day between Apple Records and Apple Computer when the latter first started selling computers with music capabilities?

As I recall, the Apple v. Apple dispute flared up on three different occasions. The first was in the 1970s not long after Apple Computer was founded, when Apple Records raised an objection, the sort of thing that gets people howling about "trademark bullies" since the two companies were at the time in totally different fields, with the Apple II computer capable only of the most primitive beeps with no conceivable competition or connection to a producer of vinyl records. (Lots of other companies have had "Apple" in their names without conflict; at one point there was an independent comic book company called Apple Comics.) This mini-conflict was resolved amicably with an agreement for both sides to keep their areas of business distinct so that there continued not to be infringement.

Then, by the mid 1980s, computers (including those in the Apple Macintosh line) had gained the ability to do more music-related stuff, such as playing CDs, composing music with appropriate software (some of it produced or distributed by Apple), and so on. Apple Records claimed a violation of their earlier understanding, and either sued or threatened to do so; this led to a more complex settlement where I think Apple Computer paid the other Apple some money and in turn got the right to do music-related computer stuff, but with the proviso that Apple Computer wouldn't directly sell music to the public, though they could sell hardware and software to manipulate it.

Then in the 2000s, Apple broke this agreement by launching the iTunes store; they tried some hair-splitting by originally not marketing iTunes directly under the Apple name, but everybody knew who ran it anyway. The newest and most expensive lawsuit resulted, which finally ended in Apple Computer buying out the trademark rights to the word "Apple" outright for some undisclosed (and presumably large) sum, and in turn leasing back limited rights to Apple Records to use in marketing their own recordings (while Apple retained all other musical-related rights to Apple along with computer-related rights).

There were rumors at the time that this settlement would also permit Apple to start selling Beatles music in the iTunes store, but nothing happened in that regard until today, when they finally announced this.

Ah, thanks very much. It was late when I posted that, in the light of day I'd just read up on it again.....