Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
The point of fair use is that '''certain use''' is fair, not arbitrary use - and the copyright still applies. And this effectively restricts what can be legally done with a work created using both GFDL and fair use material, and thus breaks the GFDL.
So we need to separate nonfree content somewhere else, and then we can claim it's mere aggregation.
This was the argument I had initially advanced (on meta:Do fair use images violate the GFDL?), but I no longer am convinced it's true. Fair use seems to be a very oddly-constructed case in which it's difficult to tell *exactly* what applies, but it appears to be the case that copyright law simply doesn't apply at all to fair use situations. Since the GFDL relies on copyright law, it thus can't really have anything to say about fair use. For example, short quotations of literature are fair use. Presumably the GFDL does not intend to prohibit any GFDL'd works from including short quotations from literature? Since afaik fair use is fair use, if that's permitted, then fair use images generally must also be permitted.
I do agree that some fair use images violate the spirit of the GFDL, and should be discouraged. For example, if something is only barely fair use for us, and only because we're a non-profit organization with an educational mission, that has the effect of making the document non-free for all practical purposes, unless the images are stripped out, while the entire point of the GFDL was to make the document free for all purposes. But things like short quotations from literature, or very famous news photographs, and so on, that would be fair use for most of our users, seem like they should be okay.
-Mark