Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 3/10/06, Paweł Dembowski
<fallout(a)lexx.eu.org> wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
It is likely that in the case of 'fair
use' the content would remain
fair use for a large majority of the downstream uses for content on
Wikipedia.
Actually, most of the content is "fair use" only to United
States
users.
It's worse than that, it's only "fair use" for use within
the United
States. Which means if an American wants to distribute a copy of
Wikipedia to someone in Africa, they have to break the law.
And I'd dispute that fair use by Wikipedia means fair use by a large
majority of the downstream users. Wikipedia can and will get away
with a lot of things that others can't and won't.
This seems like a needlessly anti-fair-use position. It may be accurate
that *some* cases of fair use are fair use only in the United States, or
only for Wikipedia, but that's hardly true of all of them, or even the
majority of them. Every time we quote an exact sentence or paragraph
from a published work that's still in copyright, we're doing so under
fair use (or fair dealing, or whatever the equivalent in various
countries is), and this seems both unproblematic and something that the
encyclopedia would be much worse off without. Perhaps fair use of
images is less widely respected internationally than fair use of textual
excerpts, but being more careful with some types of fair use is
different than abolishing fair-use content on Wikipedia entirely.
-Mark
Hoi,
There is no need to be anti fair use. It has no bearing on most
projects. The English language wikipedia is the only one where you could
argue that the American rules apply completely. So its application is
largely overrated. It is much more important to find a way that would
allow us to have a logo of a company in all the other projects. Forget
the English Wikipedia, it is only the biggest. The last time I heard
about it the other projects grow faster than en.wikipedia. So let us
address the issues of these other projects.
I do not want to abolish fair-use I could not care less. It just does
not apply to what I want done, on the projects where there is a need.
Thanks,
GerardM