[Foundation-l] Fair use being badly abused on en.wikipedia

[Robert Rohde]

On Jan 7, 2008 6:33 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

> Your comment seems to ignore some of the previous posts, Robert. While
> I disagree that the WMF should be willing to pay through the nose in
> order to attempt to set DMCA and fair use precedents the argument
> misses the important point. The issue is not "Fair use threatens
> Wikimedia" it is "Fair use violates our license and threatens our
> mission by making it difficult for our content to be reused freely."
>
> Nathan



If fair use really violates the license (and I can understand how the point
could be argued) then we should be done with it and remove all fair use.
However, Wikimedia currently operates on an assumption that the two are not
intrinsically incompatible.  Resolving the legal ambiguity is exactly one of
the areas where establishing a legal precedent would be useful.

To the other part, I'd say removing fair use threatens our mission by
handing power back to the copyright holders and unnecessarily limiting our
ability to fully discuss some topics.

It's not that I am ignoring previous points, but rather that I have a
fundementally different opinion of the role of fair use within the scope of
WMF's mission than many of the people here.  I believe there should be no
greater goal for WMF than to distribute high quality, free-of-cost knowledge
throughout the world.  The "fair use" system of the US and the similar but
different "fair dealing" systems of other countries provide mechanisms for
disseminating images and knowledge we would never be able to access
otherwise, and we should embrace that opportunity rather than shy away from
it.  Excersing those rights to otherwise inaccessible content compliment our
mission rather than detract from it.

-Robert A. Rohde