On Jan 7, 2008 6:33 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Your comment seems to ignore some of the previous posts, Robert. While I disagree that the WMF should be willing to pay through the nose in order to attempt to set DMCA and fair use precedents the argument misses the important point. The issue is not "Fair use threatens Wikimedia" it is "Fair use violates our license and threatens our mission by making it difficult for our content to be reused freely."
Nathan
If fair use really violates the license (and I can understand how the point could be argued) then we should be done with it and remove all fair use. However, Wikimedia currently operates on an assumption that the two are not intrinsically incompatible. Resolving the legal ambiguity is exactly one of the areas where establishing a legal precedent would be useful.
To the other part, I'd say removing fair use threatens our mission by handing power back to the copyright holders and unnecessarily limiting our ability to fully discuss some topics.
It's not that I am ignoring previous points, but rather that I have a fundementally different opinion of the role of fair use within the scope of WMF's mission than many of the people here. I believe there should be no greater goal for WMF than to distribute high quality, free-of-cost knowledge throughout the world. The "fair use" system of the US and the similar but different "fair dealing" systems of other countries provide mechanisms for disseminating images and knowledge we would never be able to access otherwise, and we should embrace that opportunity rather than shy away from it. Excersing those rights to otherwise inaccessible content compliment our mission rather than detract from it.
-Robert A. Rohde