Fastfission wrote:
- It *is* a loophole in a sense, though. I've been somewhat fretting
about this for awhile and not sure where I stand on it. Here's my argument:
A. Wikipedia is not supposed to have Wikipedia-only or encyclopedia-only or non-profit-only media. B. But we allow Fair Use media. C. But most of our legitimate Fair Use claims rides on the fact that we are a non-profit encyclopedia. D. So we end up allowing a lot of things which are unlikely to be usable except in non-profit contexts. E. Which seems to contradict A.
I don't think most of our fair use claims rely on C., that we're a non-profit encyclopedia. They rely primarily on the fact that we are an encyclopedia, and using them for informational purposes. I think a for-profit encyclopedia could also make use of most of them for the same reasons---for example, Britannica is probably well within their fair-use rights to illustrate their encyclopedia article on "Super Mario World" with a screenshot from the game.
The major difficulty would come if people tried to reuse the content in some form that made it no longer primarily informational/educational; if they simply distributed Wikipedia articles as is for profit, there's unlikely to be an issue.
-Mark