--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
I'd prefer it if we had nothing "fair use" in the 'pedia, but that's not a reasonable position, since even quoting from copyrighted books in the usual fashion is "fair use".
I'm very concerned about fair use materials as well. Maybe we need to recognize a spectrum of fair use. Short quotes from copyrighted books should be safe for just about any use; even the New York Times does that on a regular basis. Fetching a photo from some website and claiming fair use because the photo somehow relates to the subject at hand is dangerously close to copyright infringement though. We can probably get away with it, since we have an educational goal, no commercial interests, and are not an attractive target for lawsuits, but selling (extracts from) Wikipedia in any form is made almost impossible by these fair use landmines.
I would favor a policy against all fair use photos.
At the very least, every image page needs to state clearly where the image came from and why it can be used.
Axel
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