On 11/12/05, Delirium delirium@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.
FF