Fastfission wrote:
On 11/12/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I don't think most of our fair use claims rely on C., that we're a non-profit encyclopedia. They rely primarily on the fact that we are an encyclopedia, and using them for informational purposes. I think a for-profit encyclopedia could also make use of most of them for the same reasons---for example, Britannica is probably well within their fair-use rights to illustrate their encyclopedia article on "Super Mario World" with a screenshot from the game.
The major difficulty would come if people tried to reuse the content in some form that made it no longer primarily informational/educational; if they simply distributed Wikipedia articles as is for profit, there's unlikely to be an issue.
Well, I was under the impression that restricting downstream use to informational/educational use was too restrictive for Wikipedia's goals, so I'm not sure your argument changes anything in the end.
Even in a weaker interpretation, the argument still seems to imply that this policy places part of our project explicitly in a legal position which benefits non-for-profit and educational use in a disproportionate manner than it would for-profit and commercial use. I'm not sure whether this is compatible or not with Jimbo's feelings on re-use restrictions, though I imagine it likely comes down to how disproportionate one interprets this difference to be. I don't think there's any strong argument to say that such a difference does not exist, though -- it is just a question of how much the difference is.
This is all still only one of the four factors in fair use. If we use a fair use image our obligation to the downstream user is to let him know that we are invoking fair use. That forwarns him of possible problems. A for-profit downstream user has a responsibility to do his own due dilligence. It would be completely irresponsible for him to say in court that he used because Wikipedia said it was fair use. We are not in a position to indemnify every downstream user that copies material from Wikipedia. There are too many potential variables.. If someone successfully sues a downstream re-user for something that he took from our site it may simply be because the copyright owner never saw it on our site. It may be that we recgnized and fied the problem when the owner informed us, while our downstream user decided that this was the time to be stubborn about it.
Ec