Axel-
I can turn that one around. Suppose we freely use fair use materials. "I have heard from my dear constituents, the media conglomerates, that the Wikipedia people have built a free encyclopedia of 3 million articles, much of it stolen as so-called 'fair use'. We need to put an end to this immediately."
Sure, anyone could call fair use in our articles piracy, but that would be like calling Wikipedia pornographic because we have a photo of a clitoris. Each statement is believable only to persons who are retarded or the givers or recipients of bribes. Wikipedia is a not-for-profit encyclopedia, it is *exactly* the kind of project that fair use has been created for. The above is therefore hardly a useful statement to effect any political outcome, and would probably have the reverse psychology results that obvious vested interest statements tend to have: drive more people to Wikipedia.
Anyone fighting fair use is fighting an uphill struggle. By explicitly prohibiting fair use, we would support that struggle. And I can only emphasize once again: We lose nothing by allowing fair use -- those who want to commercialize Wikipedia can easily filter out the contents that do not meet their prospective use. But the irony lies in the fact that cracking down on "piracy" and fair use does provide an incentive to create more open content -- GNU people are secretly smiling when they hear that China is doing another public CD destruction, because they know that nothing will drive free software adoption more.
It is this fundamental conflict of interest that tends to cloud the judgment. In the end, it does not matter where the content comes from, as long as it is freely available. International copyright codes contain provisions for copying certain valuable information for educational purposes. We should do so where reasonably possible -- *with restrictions* because fair use is more narrow than the rights granted by the FDL. But cracking down on fair use altogether is an irresponsible, extremist position that will not support the cause of providing free education to the masses. And frankly, your arguments so far that we don't need any of those fair use images have been tragically weak. You won't get Don Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein to pose again in front of the camera, you know. And if we just link to a site containing the picture, that site will face the same fair use concerns that we would face by hosting it -- only it would not be able to state that it is a free encyclopedia with 130,000 articles and a clearly educational mission. And probably a decent team of lawyers by the time such problems come up.
Regards,
Erik