Brion Vibber wrote:
And remember, folks, *no picture* is much better than a picture we can't redistribute. If you didn't make it with your own hands or scan it from a piece of paper older than 1924, and it doesn't have a "public domain" or "GNU Free Documentation License" note on it, think twice.
I agree completely with this sentiment. I think we should not be pushing any boundaries with respect to fair use, because of the redistribution issue.
As Alex has been patiently teaching us, fair use is a defense, a defense that depends on the use, and for that reason, and because of our interest in free redistribution, we should take care that when we do rely on fair use, we do so in such a way that almost anyone could rely on a fair use defense for any plausible re-use of our content.
To take the easiest possible example, a quote of a few sentences of a copyrighted novel in an article about the author of that novel. This is fair use for us, and it's also going to be fair use for just about any plausible re-use of our content.
It was disabled on the English wikipedia, as that's where abuses were occuring (quite frequently). In any case I would _discourage_ such linking. And there have been enough crazy court decisions over 'deep linking' and such that I wouldn't rely on "it's just a link to another site, we're not _copying it_" for an image embedded into a web page. (IANAL)
Yes, and it's pretty rude to the other webmaster. People often refer to it as 'stealing bandwidth', which may be an overly bold claim, but still, it's not good etiquette to embed an image in that way.
--Jimbo