[WikiEN-l] Fair use issues; we need serious help

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/23/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> But what if we do? We don't need an image to illustrate every anime
> character that has an article, or to show the cover of every album, or a
> screenshot of every video game. We can have pop culture articles without
> nonfree images. No nonfree images is an option. So even 2 million pop
> culture articles wouldn't necessitate one single free image. The German
> Wikipedia seems to do just fine with that, I think we would too.

Your statement is true, but there is an obvious usefulness of being
able to include an image of the thing we're talking about in the
article on that subject...  And for copyrighted works it's generally
not possible to inclue an excerpt of the work without including some
non-free media.  So it's a trade-off. We could argue the merits of
where to draw the line... but it still remains a compromise.

Shouldn't we, instead, worry first about all the articles about
physics, mathematics, chemistry, ancient history and culture, etc
where we're not writing about a copyrighted work, where that
compromise doesn't really exist?