Template talk:Non-free reduced

No, please!

Consider Image:Marilyn Manson Mechanical Animals.jpg, where a 400x400 version was replaced with a 250x250 thumbnail. 250px is fine for display on computer screens, but what about the possible print version of Wikipedia? On paper, you'd want way more than 400px to make the image not look grainy. As far as I know, an album cover is going to be fair use regardless of the resolution. The only type of image where resolution could affect fair use is an artwork or photograph where the author expects to sell the full-resolution work (and so providing a high resolution version here would cause financial harm). The vast majority of Wikipedia's fair use images don't fall under this category. Has there been any discussion about this template anywhere? I think I'll go edit it ... User:dbenbenn 15:04, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, take a look at Wikipedia:Fair use criteria #3. I'm not at all clear that we should be web-publishing print-resolution images that belong to other parties. de:'s print run didn't have any unfree material in it, as far as I know. All of that said, I doubt that I would notice that an album cover was 400x400px, but I have replaced what appeared to be homemade scans of vinyl jackets with smaller images. Jkelly 15:23, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

400x400px hardly seems like "print resolution" to me. I'd say about you'd need at least twice that resolution for the term to properly apply. — Red XIV ^(talk) 07:01, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

400px X 400px is small enough to not really be an issue, IMO (at 300 dpi it would only be a little over an inch by an inch). What we usually mean by "high resolution" is "capable of being a replacement for a print version". In the case of an album, for example, we would not want to provide replacement sleeves for people who burn CD copies of albums. This is not strictly within the fair use clause of the US law, of course, but aiding in piracy of materials can be a charge, I am fairly sure, and in any case we are far less likely to induce any ire with people if we restrict our "fair use" to screen-res images. Again, I think in the case you mentioned the reduction from 400 to 250 did not substantially change anything legally or practically and was unnecessary. But something which is between 200-300 dpi of its print-resolution size would be problematic, I think, as a rule of thumb. --Fastfission 15:49, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

dbenbenn, your complaint doesn't seem to be with this template, but with the size of fair use images. That's a debatable topic, but a good rule to keep in mind is that the images should be large enough to depict the subject, but small enough to be of degraded quality.

I actually think this template is a good idea--I've seen some pretty high-res images claimed as fair use. The template just needs to be used by people who know what they're doing. ~MDD4696 03:44, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. Fastfission, you pointed out #3 on Wikipedia:Fair use criteria, which says "The amount of copyrighted work used should be as little as possible." Obviously this point isn't to be taken literally, because "as little as possile" = none. We are never required to have any non-free content here. So it's not really clear what #3 is intended to mean. User:dbenbenn 06:17, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

"As little as possible" is a reference to the fact that one of the fair use criteria in the copyright law has to do with amount of copyrighted material used. It is hard to know exactly how that applies in the case of digital images (usually it means amount of text take from the total textual work -- so 100% of a poem is far worse than 5% of a Russian novel even though the latter may be much longer in terms of physical size). In terms of our policy, it generally means, as I understand it, that one should not use more fair use material than is necessary for the purposes of Wikipedia. In images this can be reflect both in the number of images used as well as the size of them. The overall goal is that we don't want anybody to think that they'd have a good court case against us -- sueing us over a 400 px image is hopefully not going to be worth their time. --Fastfission 02:06, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

We should limit the size of fair use but not assume that no one else will sue us.--Jusjih 11:43, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

consensus on size limit

Is it possibe to obtain a broad consensus on the size limit before enforcing some arbitrary, personnal and fluctuent ones? The day there will be a jursiprudence on what exact image size is fair use, wikipedia could resize all the images by a bot. --Marc Lacoste 17:17, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

While no hard-and-fast rule exists on this yet, I see that the fair use definition of "low resolution" offers this guidance: "if the image cannot be displayed at full size on the image description page, it is probably too big". Non-free images exceeding this size should very probably be tagged and reduced; however... I see many images smaller than this are also being tagged, which seems unnecessary. (Example: Image:3-D Docking Mission.png, a 560x384 pixel game screenshot.) So at least for now, I'd suggest that tagging be limited to those images exceeding the thumbnail rule — it's a clearer, more objective limit that the vague "not small enough" rule that seems to be in use now. Huwmanbeing ☀★ 18:31, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Unless there's further discussion, going forward, I will assume that images reduced to 300px will meet the guidelines, as any smaller than that it would be difficult to tell what the image actually is. If you have another number in mind, please provide your justification. AkankshaG (talk) 01:00, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

If the scanned original is particularly large, the size of the reduced copy may not need to be as small. An absolute size criterion of 300px may not be appropriate. The current criterion reads: "Low- rather than high-resolution/fidelity/bit rate is used (especially where the original could be used for deliberate copyright infringement). " If the reduced-resolution copy could not reasonably be used for making a counterfeit copy of the original, and is readily recognized as a lower quality image, perhaps this is sufficient to meet the criterion. --Robert.Allen (talk) 19:23, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Automatic tagging

Would there be any way to automatically create a list or category for images being used under fair use that have a size above some threshold? That way, it could be much easier to identify images that may need to be scaled down (though not automatically since I'm sure there are exceptions). —ShadowHalo 01:02, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Not without either specific Mediawiki support, or a full database dump and a whole lot of time. Querying for image size is easy, but there's nothing in the database to easily determine whether an image is free or not. About the closest we currently come is Special:Imagelist, sorted by (file, not spatial) size. —Cryptic 03:28, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Non-free files?

Is there an equivalent template for non-free files that are not images? I need to use one in cases where a user has uploaded the full version of a copyrighted song then reduced it to a sample in compliance with music fair-use guidelines. For the moment I will just use this template until something better turns up. Road Wizard (talk) 04:15, 9 January 2010 (UTC)

Removed warning symbol

The symbol originally used in this box implies that the image is still in violation of our rules, which is no longer the case after the image has been reduced. To alleviate this confusion, I have removed the 'warning' symbol, and replaced it with a more appropriate symbol to the Admin to 'sweep' the server space and remove the prior images. AkankshaG (talk) 01:32, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Problem

Many people add this template directly instead of by substing {{furd}}, and therefore several images tagged months ago look like they were tagged today. Is there something that can be added to bring up a warning to say the date hasn't been included? AnemoneProjectors 02:04, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

This issue has just been brought to my attention and I'm thinking this most recent edit to the template may have something to do with the dates continually being reset. Perhaps it should be reverted? — ξ^xplicit 04:22, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

I'll undo it and we can assess the template's behavior for changes. The user that made the change is on a long term vacation. Dawnseeker2000 04:28, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

I just added the template, with timestamp, to File:Kellypogo4366.jpg and File:Pogokelly030864.jpg, and it says "Error: Invalid time". Why, and how can we fix it? Pais (talk) 15:14, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

I think I've fixed it. I've never used this much template syntax before... -- John of Reading (talk) 10:27, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

I think you've fixed it too. At least those two images are now showing their timestamp correctly. Pais (talk) 10:48, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

This was wrong again. I managed to change something so that files are placed in Category:Rescaled fairuse files with invalid timestamp if no time is specified. --Stefan2 (talk) 10:53, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Link to a Talk page for discussing the addition of this template to specific files

I think that this template should probably include a link to an appropriate talk page where editors who wish to discuss its addition to a particular file page can do so. Or at least some guidance as to which which talk page would be appropriate. --Robert.Allen (talk) 19:28, 8 August 2011 (UTC)