Justin Cormack wrote:
With magazine covers, if we had say downloaded (made up example; I havent looked into where they came from) the Official Playboy Magazine Cover website and stuck them all in wikipedia then we would be liable - we would be taking advertising revenue from their website thus causing damages. Regardless of the amount of important critical commentary we make on them.
In theory yes, in practice the fair-use images are still pretty thinly spread over our 900K+ articles. In my cleaning-out work on the generic fair-use category I've only seen a handful of articles that have more than one or two fair-use images, and they tend to be articles on Pokemon characters and the like, where several stubly articles have been merged into one (as per a common practice for fictional characters).
Right now I think we're still in the process of figuring out much we have and documenting the copyright holders. (The now-deprecated category of generic fair-use images still has many thousands of images left in it.) Once that's under control, I think we'll be in a better position to focus on articles and areas that have excessive numbers of copyrighted images. It wouldn't hurt to start a discussion in the fair use wikiproject now, since it will likely take a while to develop consensus on a good objective standard.
Stan