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