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