--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
The wiki-author doesn't add a picture, he adds a reference to a picture.
...with the intent and expectation that the image and the text be combined into a whole by the user's browser. It's a technical detail that this combining is done by the browser rather than by the server - had we used PDF rather than HTML as our distribution medium, then the combining would take place on the server.
So yes, fair use quotes are technically violations of GFDL, but completely harmless.
Many copyright holders see things differently. Author Dan van der Vat, for example, was asked to pay 25 British pounds for quoting two sentences from Churchill's History of the Second World War in his book "The Atlantic Campaign". Sure: The legality is questionable.
In other words: this would be laughed out of court.
But don't kid yourself into believing that nobody would ever consider quotes infringing. Treating fair use of quotes and images entirely differently is hypocritical and wrong.
It is neither, since short textual quotes are quite different from images in at least two respects relevant to fair use.
1) Quotes are typically a tiny fraction of the whole work, while images are typically 100% of the whole work.
2) There is no functioning market for the rights in short quotes, but there is a functioning market for the rights in images.
Now, I don't think Wikipedia is at any risk whatsoever: if somebody complains about an image, we simply take it down. We don't have money, so we won't get sued. The downstream users of our materials however may not share these luxuries, and in addition may have commercial interests which weakens their fair use defense considerably. In effect our fair use images shut out large classes of potential users of the encyclopedia.
Axel
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