bits of blue sky!

[ratcreature]

I had almost forgotten that skies come in colors other than gray, dark gray and oppressively dark gray. I can even see the sun!

Comments

[astridv]

So envious!

[ratcreature]

Maybe you will get some sunlight soon too. *crosses fingers*

I have to runs some errands now (the adapter of my router died yesterday, so for now I'm running it with my reserve multi-volt capable adapter, but want to get a proper replacement) and will be able to do so in actual sunshine rather than trudging through foggy drizzle. :D

[astridv]

I'm happy for you guys. :)
Maybe we'll be lucky tomorrow as well.

Hey, OT, did you read morgandawn's comment in tiyire's post?
I was surprised (although I shouldn't be as the world is a mighty big and diverse place) that many non-US fans* are unfamiliar with the concept of fair use as it is not a universal right in all countries. Copyright law is local and in the US fair use goes a long way to supporting education and expression.[...]So of course, fannish culture aside, some fans don't grok how important fair use is to us as individuals and as fans. And this may explain why they do not support its use.

I mean, are they trying to piss people off? I was doing a good job of staying out of this but I can't read this as anything else but "these non-US folks just don't understand fair use."

:P

It annoys me that my OTW membership fee supports that kind of mentality.

[ratcreature]

Argggh. I thought I had mellowed over the last years wrt to Fanlore, but the statements manage to piss me off again and again.

Frankly if Fanlore at least followed its own policy I'd be much less angry about it. I'd still think the right thing to do would be to go with fannish norms, but if they followed that they'd have art they got permission for and then without permission you'd had maybe small cover scans (like on goodreads) and the occasional piece of other properly sourced fanart where it illustrates the text (say an article talks about Vulcan penises in fanfic and they put an illustration of one there). Nobody can tell me that US copyright law thinks it's a-okay to grab a dozen interior zine scans sourced to some ebay seller who put them up briefly to sell their copy, dump them onto a zine page, with no additional info than "interior art of zine X", while the text of the wiki does not mention the art, or talk about the art, or needs it in any way, because that use is "fair".

[astridv]

I agree completely. But what do I know, being not from the US and all.

We Europeans are a simple people. :P

[ratcreature]

What I also find completely disingenuous is the calls for patience to deal with criticism of how images are handled. It is not like suddenly landed over 33000 images in their wiki and surprise!criticism cropped up.

It took from 2008 to 2010 for them to even arrive at an image policy. In that time about about fourteen thousand images had been uploaded, before they even had the current form with the fields for crediting. Nothing was done to discourage image uploading before a policy was there, then nothing was done to go tackle the backlog with better crediting and checking whether it actually met their "fair use" standard at least. And everyone including the wiki committee was aware in 2010 that not everybody was happy with Fanlore's practice. I certainly talked at them at length in the Fanlore comm back then.

Then little was done to improve things in the next years (except that the crediting template was slightly better), and the number of images doubled, making the problem even more intractable. And now they ask for patience again? Maybe in two years it will be 60000 images...