Yes, but this BOLD argument has largely been dismissed in favor of the CAUTIOUS argument which says 'we just dont want to find out what "a court" (i.e. a U.S. court) might say on the fair use issue, so we are going to exercise extreme cautious in our application of fair use, in any property-infringement claims.
Wikipedia's philosophy is like Debian's, which for sake of purity will avoid loading Java, Flash player, etc, and thereby will lose substantial end-user 'marketshare' to slick sub-distros like Ubuntu and Mepis. Simply tagging fair use (should we going to prune 'fair use' of text too?) would suffice, if such would be integrated with the means to strip the 'non-free' matter from the 'free' version. The non-free could even be a patch to the 'free' distro.
Stevertigo
--- Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
fair use says nothing about public purpose. Now a
few excerpts would
be ok, but not the whole thing. You can hear about it from CNN.
Actually, a number of copyright law commentators
have suggested that
"public purpose" may be a legitimate restriction on
exclusive rights,
as a form of "fair use". The claim was raised
inartfully in RTC v.
Henson, but I don't believe the court ever ruled on
the merits of that
claim (mainly because Henson is a freaking idiot).
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