Fastfission wrote:
On 6/21/06, James user_jamesday@myrealbox.com wrote:
This aspect applies to almost all uses in articles in the work called Wikipedia by its authors. Whether it's a baseball card, poster, album cover, book cover, mural, painting or postcard, it's not an encyclopedia article and the use is in one is transformative and strongly favors fair use.
The one problem I have with this is that I don't know where the line between "moving contexts is transformative" starts and where one gets away from things like the Seinfeld case, where the context is definitely different (TV show to trivia book) but it was found to be infringement because it cut into the copyright holder's ability to make a trivia book in the future. Obvious one case does not simply trump another case, but in any event this is a nice assurement that "encyclopedic use" has plausibility as transformative.
I haven't read the Seinfeld case, but I would expect that the line here would be that a trivia book devoted exclusively to a single TV seriew could be viewed as a derivative work, but this would not be the case if a handful of questions about the program were part of a broader context.
I don't expect that there will ever be a simple demarcation line for what is safe to use. In any event, a safe harbor is always available in cases of uncertainty.
You don't need to have specific justification for each image use - readers know from the context that you're illustrating your point (but we should still say so in the fair use explanation, because it's prudent to do so and remove doubt about our intentions).
Additionally having a fair use justification is also meant to scare off cheap trouble by making our case look strong from the beginning and demonstrating an awareness of the legal issues involved.
Demonstrating awareness is key if any of these are to go any further.
Ec