On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 6:32 AM, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 2/24/08, WJhonson(a)aol.com <WJhonson(a)aol.com>
wrote:
And no one has ever implied that a book cover is free use. However, imho,
it is *fair use*.
You appear to be confused. A work itself cannot be "a fair use".
Certain uses of a work can be fair uses. This is why the nature and
the context of the use are important.
It's clear that this refers to the context of a certain article.
However, some
editors want to eliminate any fair use entirely from the
project.
That to me is not in the best interests of the project.
As many have observed, your real beef thus appears to be with the
Foundation's policies and the free content nature of the Wikimedia
projects. You have, as always, the right to fork off
a copy of Wikipedia and start your own project. Wikipedia, meanwhile,
will remain the *free* encyclopaedia.
--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain(a)gmail.com
It's also clear that Wikipedia's fully capable of being a free
encyclopaedia project with some insertions of text & media that rely
upon the fair use (or fair dealings, for instance in my case)
doctrine. The foundation specifically enables projects to develop a
policy to cover how this is done - which "implies" the foundation
approves of doing this.
It's a completely baseless argument to rely upon "fair use text &
media inhibit downstream reuse" - while it's true that someone
modifying the content for downstream reuse will need to watch the
applicability of the fair use text/media, so do things like libel laws
& artists' moral rights; we simply cannot hope to ensure that
downstream reusers can mindlessly modify and reuse content - those
modifying the content will always need to check whether they're
modified content will be legal.
Cheers
WilyD