[Foundation-l] Fair use images

[Delirium]

Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>On 3/10/06, Paweł Dembowski <fallout at lexx.eu.org> wrote:
>  
>
>>Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>It is likely that in the case of 'fair use' the content would remain
>>>fair use for a large majority of the downstream uses for content on
>>>Wikipedia.
>>>      
>>>
>>Actually, most of the content is "fair use" only to United States
>>users.
>>
>>    
>>
>It's worse than that, it's only "fair use" for use within the United
>States.  Which means if an American wants to distribute a copy of
>Wikipedia to someone in Africa, they have to break the law.
>
>And I'd dispute that fair use by Wikipedia means fair use by a large
>majority of the downstream users.  Wikipedia can and will get away
>with a lot of things that others can't and won't.
>  
>
This seems like a needlessly anti-fair-use position.  It may be accurate 
that *some* cases of fair use are fair use only in the United States, or 
only for Wikipedia, but that's hardly true of all of them, or even the 
majority of them.  Every time we quote an exact sentence or paragraph 
from a published work that's still in copyright, we're doing so under 
fair use (or fair dealing, or whatever the equivalent in various 
countries is), and this seems both unproblematic and something that the 
encyclopedia would be much worse off without.  Perhaps fair use of 
images is less widely respected internationally than fair use of textual 
excerpts, but being more careful with some types of fair use is 
different than abolishing fair-use content on Wikipedia entirely.

-Mark