On 11/12/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org>
wrote:
I don't think most of our fair use claims rely
on C., that we're a
non-profit encyclopedia. They rely primarily on the fact that we are an
encyclopedia, and using them for informational purposes. I think a
for-profit encyclopedia could also make use of most of them for the same
reasons---for example, Britannica is probably well within their fair-use
rights to illustrate their encyclopedia article on "Super Mario World"
with a screenshot from the game.
The major difficulty would come if people tried to reuse the content in
some form that made it no longer primarily informational/educational;
if they simply distributed Wikipedia articles as is for profit, there's
unlikely to be an issue.
Well, I was under the impression that restricting downstream use to
informational/educational use was too restrictive for Wikipedia's
goals, so I'm not sure your argument changes anything in the end.
Even in a weaker interpretation, the argument still seems to imply
that this policy places part of our project explicitly in a legal
position which benefits non-for-profit and educational use in a
disproportionate manner than it would for-profit and commercial use.
I'm not sure whether this is compatible or not with Jimbo's feelings
on re-use restrictions, though I imagine it likely comes down to how
disproportionate one interprets this difference to be. I don't think
there's any strong argument to say that such a difference does not
exist, though -- it is just a question of how much the difference is.
This is all still only one of the four factors in fair use. If we use a
fair use image our obligation to the downstream user is to let him know
that we are invoking fair use. That forwarns him of possible problems.
A for-profit downstream user has a responsibility to do his own due
dilligence. It would be completely irresponsible for him to say in
court that he used because Wikipedia said it was fair use. We are not
in a position to indemnify every downstream user that copies material
from Wikipedia. There are too many potential variables.. If someone
successfully sues a downstream re-user for something that he took from
our site it may simply be because the copyright owner never saw it on
our site. It may be that we recgnized and fied the problem when the
owner informed us, while our downstream user decided that this was the
time to be stubborn about it.
Ec