Axel Boldt wrote:
* the material can be used under the [[fair use]] doctrine and such fair use will likely extend to all third party users of Wikipedia
Well, certainly I think that's the right approach to take. We want to use stuff that we can use. We want our stuff to be reusable by others pretty easily. And we should flag anything for which questions are likely to arise, so that third parties (or ourselves, in the future) can figure out what everything is.
The central questions, to my mind, are: (1) where should we draw the line, and how can we make it easy for contributors to understand, and (2) what disclaimers do we need on the download page so that people can easily grasp that what is GNU FDL is our own content, and that the database does contain fair use materials, appropriately flagged when possible, so that they can puzzle over fair use for *their* use.
The complication here arises from the fact that fair use depends on the use, not on the image or quote itself.
--Jimbo