Battlestar Wiki talk:Think Tank/Copyright Strategy

Comments

I really am not sure which way I feel on this. On the one hand, it would be cool to host/mirror some of that content, and there'd be something "shiny" about being all "official" and everything. I'm concerned though that some people might take that as a license to bully (well, we're official and you're not), as well as expose us/them to risk in that anything we do might be construed as being official (which obviously, it wouldn't be). I'm not sure if we really need anything more than fair-use material in order to satisfy the primarily goals of the wiki, but this issue comes up often enough that I thought it best that we get a feeling for how everybody wanted to go. --Steelviper 07:54, 5 March 2007 (CST)

Aren't there already bandwith issues? Would the offering of such large amounts of data, that are already available elsewhere, impact the performance negatively? Obtaining a license for promo pictures bigger than the tiny 400*400 they offer might be interesting. And a few hundred kBs (if we still shrink them down somewhat) of jpegs shouldn't impact the performance too bad either. But Steelviper has a point that other sites would probably then try to follow suit and get one as well. The thing BS Wiki has going for it, is that it's more than just a file dump, though. --Serenity 08:56, 5 March 2007 (CST)

Bandwidth is presently NOT the bottleneck. Right now it's CPU's and RAM that's getting killed by heavy traffic. We could afford to move more per day on bandwidth, if the servers were up and able to serve them. I'm thinking the 400x400 (at 72dpi) was more of a guideline, but the fundamental idea is that you're using the images to illustrate the concept/episode rather than presenting/archiving the work to be examined for its own sake. 1024 was indeed arbitrary, but I also adopted it in the initial draft because that's a common resolution for viewing, and anything larger than that is obviously being used for detailed analysis (and not illustrating the idea). "Fair-use" is all about representing a SAMPLE of the work rather than actually reproducing the work. It's easier to claim fair use on screen shots, since a couple screen shots here and there obviously don't replace the experience of watching the show. (A frame by frame catalog of the episode, however, would be hard to justify). There's actually a pretty good article on fair use at Wikipedia. Basically, you have to look at "Purpose and character", "Nature of the copied work", "Amount and substantiality", and "Effect upon work's value". Basically, if we can work to make sure we're good in all those areas, then actually we'd be within our rights to host it REGARDLESS of what NBC-Universal had to say about it. Obviously, we're looking to stay in their good graces, but one of the easiest guidelines for staying in those graces would be to generally follow the fair use principle, unless we have explicit written license/authorization to do otherwise. --Steelviper 12:21, 5 March 2007 (CST)

Consensus and Legality Note

A previous failed proposal on hosting episode transcripts (which was denied by Sci Fi Channel publicity) as well as a recent crackdown on using the high-resolution promo images appears to kill this proposal, as NBC Universal and Sci Fi Channel does not appear willing or able to provide exceptions to their copyrights. I will archive this proposal as "failed." --Spencerian 09:16, 12 April 2007 (CDT)