Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
The dissenting High Court judges thought that the
majority was
deliberately misinterpreting the law to achieve a victory for common sense.
I can sympathize with his outrage. ;-)
More generally, it seems to me that there is a tendancy
round here to
assume laws are written the same way as programming language definitions.
From my layperson's perspective, that seems to
be quite wrong - there's a
lot of fudging and playing around with ambiguities
to get the "right"
outcome, and screw the pedantry.
We've often heard it said that ignorance of the law is no excuse. It
works both ways. It neither excuses a wrongful act, nor a failure to
take a rightful benefit.
So my gut feeling is that the common sense aspect of
using film stills to
illustrate an encyclopedia article makes it very, very unlikely we'll
ever get challenged on it, and that if we ever were we'd be highly
likely to win any court case.
Absolutely.