It is for all these reasons that I'm a 'soft' advocate of doing away with fair use materials to the greatest extent possible in the future. I say that I'm a 'soft' advocate because I haven't said or done much about it, and I'm not about to issue any sort of decree about it.
Unless they state where the quote comes from or acknowledge it is copied under fair use it is hard to know. This makes it difficult to redistribute anything under Wikipedia IMHO.
Well, let me get your opinion about an example.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath
This page contains 3 quotes which seem to me to be excellent examples of fair use that could realistically be reused by just about anyone for just about any purpose.
There is a quote from the Swedish Academy's announcement of the Nobel Prize for Steinbeck. There is a quote from Battle Hymn of The Republic by Julia Ward Howe, explaining the title of the book. There's a quote of Woody Guthrie's reaction to the film version of the book.
It seems a bit much for us to require authors to identify such uses as 'fair use', because it's basically obvious. And, I think, completely unproblematic.
Compare that to this page: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanessa_Redgrave
Those photos both look like movie stills, and so under fair use, I think *we* are on fairly safe grounds, but I'm less sure about others. And I'm less sure about *us*, in fact. Ideally, we'd like to get those released under GNU FDL, or some other free license, but that isn't going to happen. Secondarily, we could try to get permission to use them ourselves -- which ought to be pretty easy, other than the total amount of work involved.
But getting permission to use copyrighted materials *ourselves*, while not simultaneously getting permission for people who want to *take* our work and reuse it in ways that we can't predict, seems inconsistent to me with the goals of GNU freedom.
So, I have a (slight) preference for doing away with such images altogether, even though I think we can use them ourselves without difficulty.
Maybe I'm wrong -- maybe movie stills are exactly like quotes, and not especially problematic for re-use. But I don't know of any court precedent -- which isn't to say that there isn't any.
--Jimbo