On 02/03/2008, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Fair use doesn't work like that (okey I admit I'm not totaly certain what would happen since no one is yet to take such a monumentally stupid case to court). You appear to think that fair use is some magic incarnation that can make all your copyright issues go away it does not. If fact it makes them worse. Fair use is hard. It is case law rather than statute law driven. That means that not only are their vast grey areas but there are random islands of black and white in the greyness that you are unlikely to know about. On top of that rather a lot of it is subject to change without warning.
The key point is that "fair use" is a *defence* in court *when someone sues you*. So there's good reason most times not to push it in the name of good sense (and good reason other times to hold firm in the name of freedom).
As an encyclopedia run by a non-profit that doesn't even take ads, Wikimedia could probably get away with pushing it *very far indeed* if we wanted to be dicks about it, and could take and use really quite a remarkable range of stuff as fair use.
But (a) we're all about the free content (b) we'd actually rather not be dicks about it all. So the Non-Free (note, not "fair use", it's the "non-free" aspect it's all about) Images Policy is much more restrictive than what we could get away with, and really isn't about the law at all - it's about an overwhelmingly strong bias toward genuine free content, and non-free content is basically here under sufferance.
So any discussion of the non-free images policy that talks about fair use and what the law allows is (IMO) missing the point of the non-free images policy.
Claiming fair use on your own work makes no friggin sense (unless you no longer hold the copyright) no matter how you try and dodge around the point thus we are not going to change policy to white list those who try.
Indeed, because an author cannot violate a copyright they own, and cannot sue themselves for the violation.
- d.