You've raised some good points, Andrew.
Even if would be fair use to use this to illustrate an article on the [[Lindisfarne Gospels]] (rare item, not much photographed, &c.) despite it being copyrighted... would it be fair use to use it to illustrate an article on, say, [[Rare-book photography]]? Sure, it's an example of such an image, but there's certainly thousands more of equal usability. How about using it to illustrate an article on [[Books]], or the [[Bible]]? Again, some relevance, but other images are just as good or better.
Indeed. Here's another example. I'd argue that it's legitimate and inevitable fair use to use copyrighted artwork by a living or "recently" deceased artist in an article *about the artist*. Using it to illustrate other articles is unnecessary and not appropriate. Look at this image, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Branstock.jpg
If we were using it in an article about the artist [[Alan Lee]] I'd say it was fine. But we're not. Instead we're using it to illustrate articles on Norse mythology. I don't know enough U.S. law to know whether that's legal or not but it's certainly not necessary.
And just so you can see how deep our fair use problem goes this image was recently uploaded by User:Wiglaf, who is an admin and an excellent editor (one I'm working with all the time). I don't mean to slight him in any way. In fact about half of the images in [[Category:Images from Norse mythology]] were uploaded by him and almost all are in the public domain.
This is also an education problem for those of us who aren't legal types and/or who aren't from the U.S. Scandinavian editors like Wiglaf and me hear that Wikipedia is under U.S. law and that something called "fair use" is okay. From how it seems to be used on Wikipedia it's natural to assume that it works something like this:
"You can use some copyrighted material without asking for permission as long as you don't do too much of it."
But that seems to be pretty far from the truth.
So, the people in the know need to educate those of us who aren't really.
This may, potentially, be a problem with the way we tag things - fair use inherently seems to imply "in the context of the article for which it was originally used". It may be fair use the second time (and probably is), but may not... I don't know what, if anything, to do about this, but thought I'd kick it out.
Right. We don't really have a technical solution to that within our present system. But if we're going to go through all the fair use images and add information to them we could make sure that we explicitly mention that we've verified that the image is fair use for pages foo, bar and foobar. Anyone wanting to use the image on a new page should then add to the image information page.
Regards, Haukur