Battlestar Wiki:Think Tank/Promotional Images

From Battlestar Wiki, the free, open content Battlestar Galactica encyclopedia and episode guide

Recently NBC-Universal has issued takedown requests to some of the repositories of catalogs of high-resolution promotional pictures. In order to avoid incurring the wrath of NBC-Universal, we should draft and implement a policy with respect to promotional images that ensures that NBC-Universal's copyright interests are protected while still providing meaningful (but fair use) representations of the episodes.

Promotional Images

NBC-Universal's biggest problem appeared to be with the sites that contained the entire library of high-resolution promotional photography. Since the Battlestar Wiki's primary mission is not that of a media repository, we have never particularly taken to hording high-resolution images anyway (of any kind).

With regards to promotional images, we should therefore adopt a policy that limits the size/resolution of promotional images that we will host/present, and that also limits the number of promotional images used.

Promotional images should be limited to an "as-needed" basis. Promotional images should therefore never be found to be "orphans", and any promotional image not found serving a fair-use purpose within an article on the wiki should be deleted.

High resolution promotional images shall not be hosted on the media server of the wiki, unless explicit license to do so is obtained by the respective copyright holder(s). A maximum resolution of 1024x768 (or 768x1024 for portrait aspect images) should be adopted. All efforts should be made to preserve the original aspect ratio of the promotional image when resizing it.

Upon adoption of the policy, a sweep of the media repository would be necessary to identify any images that fall outside the guidelines (in terms of whether the image is being used, and whether the image is of a sufficiently small resolution), and offending images should be appropriately "corrected" (deleted or resized, respectively).

Adoption and implementation of such a policy should serve to help demonstrate our dedication to respecting the NBC-Universal copyright, and hopefully would help mitigate the risk of receiving takedown notification/litigation of our own.