On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Yann Forget wrote:
Le Thursday 19 February 2004 19:55, Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen a écrit :
It may well be that "fair use" is protected in the USA, but that doesn't mean that some big nasty company can't sue the project. Many companies in the USA use the legal system as a blunt weapon, without caring much whether they'll eventually win or lose any given fight.
They do not need fair use for that. They can use many other arguments. So this is a poor argument against fair use.
I agree this argument is weaker than the others in favour of avoiding fair use images.
Nevertheless: Using images that typically belong to just the kind of people we're going to be pissing of the most sets us up particularly well for attacks from them.
For most other arguments (say libel), we could deny that that was the case.
Here, we won't be able to deny that we used somebody else's copyrighted work - just that our interpretation of the law makes it ok to do so.
To put it in words that are usually unfamiliar to me: We don't want to be dogmatists. We don't want to fight for the right to use these images. We want to be pragmatists, which means to focus on creating the encyclopedia.
-- Daniel