Conservapedia:Joaquín Martínez

Joaquín Martínez Rosado is from Campeche, Mexico. He claims to be an academic and is Conservapedia's resident specialist on the fine arts. As resident art thief, Joaquín is the most prominent uploader of (misappropriated) images at Conservapedia. In the December 13 incident, he voiced his support for  JessicaT.

According to his autobiography, for 11 years he was a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. For those who say that Conservapedia sysops are devoid of intellectual abilities, Martínez has published 7 books and collaborated in 5 more. You can find some of them at the Library of Congress, including one suspiciously titled "What every leader should know". Martinez also apparently has a daughter whose picture he displays for the world to see.

Liberals and conservatives alike have often caused Joaquín Martínez to be Conservapedia's #1 victim of Really Horrible UTF-8 Parsing. His non-ASCII user name has occasionally shown up wrong in outside reports (such as ones in RationalWiki), true, but the technical incompetence at Conservapedia has sometimes landed him in real trouble in that end; for example, after the week that never was, due to the use of a wrong character encoding when the backup was restored, he was unable to use his normal account and had to 'temporarily' make an that he still uses.

Misappropriation of images?
As already mentioned, Joaquín is a very busy uploader, with the bulk of his uploads being related to images of artistic merit (such as reproductions of paintings, and photos of historical buildings). Copyright legislation may seem complicated, particularly to those who prefer to avoid reading, and Joaquín has found a unique solution to this problem: he ignores the law.

Regardless as to the copyright or license of the image in question, and the intended use, Joaquín will almost always mark Conservapedia's usage of the images as being fair use. This reaches monumentally stupid levels when he appropriates public domain images, yet labels them as being fair use. He regularly raids the liberal Wikimedia Commons, where most images are available under permissive licenses, such as the GFDL and the various Creative Commons licenses, yet even those are treated to the fair use treatment.

In most cases his illegal use of images is made in order that he can have pretty pictures to place in articles. Fair use allows images to be used in specific contexts, but Joaquín seems to have interpreted fair use doctrine as being something that allows him to take whatever he wants in order to make the articles appear pretty.

It is curious that a sysop on a conservative Christian web site would have such a reckless disregard for the law, and even curiouser when one notes that the owner of the site, Andrew Schlafly, is a self proclaimed educator and holds a Harvard law degree.

A sample of Joaquín's "liberation" of images
Is Joaquín a thief, incompetent, or just too lazy to respect the moral and legal rights of authors? Consider this sample of Joaquín's image uploads during December 2009 and January 2010: