Björn Lindqvist wrote:
I guess this will ignite a large debate but um... Is "fair use" material allowed on WP? (Answer yes or no plz :-).
I know you're looking for a simple "yes" or "no" answer, but unfortunately, there isn't one.
Legally, the answer to whether or not we can use such materials is 'yes'. But the use does actually have to *be* fair use, which is a different legal concept from abiding by the license of the copyright owner. And whether or not a particular use of something is fair use can be a sticky matter.
Ethically, I think that fair use presents something of a dilemma for us. It's implausible to think that we could get by without ANY fair use. Every quote from a copyrighted source, even a short quote, is done under the doctrine of fair use. If an article about Steinbeck's East of Eden quotes from the book for the purpose of comment, that's fair use. There's no rational reason to disallow such use.
On the other hand, some uses that would be "fair" for us would likely *not* be for people who would like to relicense and repurpose our content. So we ought to be respectful of the spirit of GNU freedom and tend to refrain from using such materials when they might pose a significant barrier to re-use.
Then, can images from this site http://www.pics4learning.com/index.php?view=image_use be used in WP? Once again, yes or no.
Some of the same principles outlined above apply to use 'by permission'. If we get permission from someone to put a particular image on our website -- as would be the case with these folks, because our use does meet the spirit (I think) and the letter (with some stretching, since we aren't technically teachers or students, but we are arguably an educational setting) of their conditions of use -- if we get permission, we can certainly use the images on our site, but we may cause trouble for those wishing to re-use the content, those who don't *have* permission.
I love to add pictures to articles. But it is very frustrating when you realise that the time was wasted and that the pictures cannot be used on WP.
Yes, that's a big frustration to be sure.
In this particular case, I wonder if you'd be willing to contact the pics4learning.com people and ask them how hard it would be for them to go back to their photographers and ask for them to license their content under a free license such as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike?
--Jimbo