[Foundation-l] Fair Use (again)

[Ray Saintonge]

Andre Engels wrote:

>In my opinion the point of departure of such a 'middle ground' should be
>that the inclusion of the fair use image should not hinder the publication
>possibilities of the article as a whole, that is, downstream users should be
>able to take the article including the picture, and publish it, under the
>GFDL, commercially, with modifications. Perhaps I should restrict that by
>adding that their modifications do not change significantly the way the
>image is used - taking a Wikipedia article and dropping everything but the
>picture, then publishing that under GFDL as a derived work from the
>Wikipedia article is not the kind of thing that should necessarily be
>possible, but taking the single paragraph to which the picture is most
>connected, making some minor changes to the text and then putting it and the
>image in a different GFDL document and publishing that either commercially
>or non-commercially should be.
>
Your premise for a middle ground is reasonable.  The fact that in the 
course of your writing the above you should think of a possible 
difficulty before finishing your paragraph only shows that it is not a 
simple matter.  We think of derivative work as something which retains 
at least some characteristice of the source work, but if it no longer 
includes any of the Wkitext that accompanied the fair use picture is 
that still a derivative of the Wikipedia article.  Our fair use depends 
on context.  If someone downstream uses a Wikipedia article that 
includes a fair use image he needs to also include enough context, but 
there is no way to do that.

I would be curious to here if there has even been a single legal case 
dealing with the transitivity of fair use.

Ec