First a few words about a specific example, but please also read to the bottom where I make MY MAIN POINT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivian_Gas_War
This is a generally good article-in-progress, and the photos are very nice, but I find them highly problematic.
There are currently 3 images on the page, all taken from indymedia.org. Two of them are likely taken by IndyMedia activists, and it strikes me as unlikely that they will complain about our use, fair use doctrine or no. IndyMedia is an extremely political website whose views are, ahem, quite different from my own, but nonetheless I suspect that they have no beef with our NPOV policy.
It *does* strike me as likely that they would object vociferously, though, to re-use by potential re-licensees, and I think that in a case like this, _even if our use_ qualifies as "fair use", re-use by _many_ other people would _not_ qualify.
For that reason, I think that these images, and images from similar sources, should not be used in Wikipedia.
The third image, the professionally-done graphical map showing the events of October 12, was taken from IndyMedia, but even the person who uploaded (Stevertigo) notes "Fair Use//maybe problem -- untraced source--via Indymedia". Ai-yi-yi! Very bad!
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MY MAIN POINT
"The Independent Media Center is a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media's distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity."
Their efforts in this area, as far as I've been able to determine, mainly consist of promoting tyranny around the world as an antidote to the problems of freedom and prosperity. ;-) But my own political leanings aside, it *does* seem likely to me that the IndyMedia people could be quickly convinced to adopt a policy consistent with their own stated goals, i.e. to release all their images under a free license.
If they could be so persuaded, then there would be no problem at all with our use of their images. They would achieve some of their goals, I suppose, by getting their images included in a respectable source, as well as being cited by that source.
And here's where I think a too-easy reliance on the crutch of "fair use" can be harmful. We have an opportunity before us to encourage a likely receptive audience to engage in free licensing, and yet we have passed on that because it's just too easy to take their content and mumble and wave our hands about fair use, knowing full well that they probably won't complain anyway.
Fair use is a dangerous crutch, and I *really* think we need to start reforming our fair use practices to be *much* more strict.
Fair use is an absolute necessity for us in some contexts. But it should be used judiciously and with great care, and only when every other (freely licensed) alternative has been exhausted.
In this case, I think that hasn't happened. We used the images (well, Stevertigo did) because they were good, and because it was easy.
--Jimbo