On 5/19/06, Justin Cormack justin@specialbusservice.com wrote:
If the copyright holder objects then they might sue. Whether we win or not, its not worth our while wasting money on cases like this. We are trying to make a free encyclopaedia, so paying lawyers to defend our right to use non free stuff is against the aims of the Foundation.
Dont get attached to fair use. Its not part of our mission. It will all be gone in a few years at the latest. Dont bother defending it.
Justinc
Unless you are speaking in the ridicoulously long-term sense in which everything (hopefully) passes into the public domain, fair use is inevitably part of our mission. There are entire sectors of articles where fair use is necessary, as the copyright holders will definitely not release the images under a decent license, and where recreation under a different license is not acceptable. From my own experience: the Star Wars article. We only accept canon depictions- and because canonicity policies say that only material authorized and licensed by the copyright holders is canon, and because the copyright holders will only do proprietary releases, we cannot, by definition, have free images relating to Star Wars. Indeed, the absolute best we could do is perhaps have some free images of fans, (though trademark and copyright issues are still problematic. If we have a picture of a bunch of fans dressed up in pitch-perfect Stormtrooper , tusken raider, Royal Guards etc. costumes, can that really be GFDL'ed or PD'ed?), or maybe of productions.
~maru