I'm talking to Lawrence Lessig and Richard Stallman about our questions regarding fair use and the GNU FDL. It's apparently a more complex issue than I had previously realized. Even RMS said that the answer was more difficult than he first thought.

Lessig is, of course, a very famous and busy person, and he asks that I come up with a specific example or two of a problematic fair use example.

Let's discuss this so that I can get some ideas to come up with good examples. Please include URLs on wikipedia that we are concerned about.

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To refresh your memory... the problem has to do with reuse. We have the right, as copyright owners, to license our own work under the GNU FDL. We also have the right to use certain copyrighted materials under the "fair use" doctrine. But we can't be assured that the people we license our content to also have the right to fair use, since the right can depend on factors that might differ for others.

So the question is, do we need to disclaim something? Can we disclaim something? Or does the GNU FDL commit us to saying something that is not true, i.e. that we grant people the right to use and modify even the fair use components of the work we are distributing?

My rough sense of the answer I'm getting from RMS and Lessig is that we can simply add a disclaimer in an FAQ on our site, explaining that *our work* is GNU FDL, but that it includes "fair use" quotations and illustrations, and that it is the responsibility of the licensee to make sure that "fair use" of those parts applies to them as well as to us.

This is similar to GPL issues involving the legal use of code that might violate crypto export.

Even so, I want to give some good and challenging examples.

My "first pass" would be these three:

1. A simple and ordinary quote from a primary source. A quote from a book by Lawrence Lessig, in an article about Lawrence Lessig.

2. A quote of poetry. (Because RMS suggests that there is some special rule for poetry that makes it especially problematic for fair use.)

3. A low-res thumbnail of an album cover or movie box cover, used as an illustration in an article about the full work in question.

Please help me think of better examples, if they exist.

--Jimbo