[Foundation-l] Wikiquote

[Geoffrey Plourde]

I am unable to figure out what the big deal is with having fair use quotes and how it affects the Foundation. Quotes are quotes are quotes. No one is ever going to be able to sue us for quoting them. If it is from a copyrighted work, I should think that the material will gain more publicity from being quoted. 

Also, this is an area that should be left up to the Wikiquote community. The communities determine, under their EDPs, how much fair use stuff they want. It is not for the Foundation or this mailing list to second guess them. 

Geoffrey



----- Original Message ----
From: Chad <innocentkiller at gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2008 3:48:52 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikiquote

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 5:58 PM, mike.lifeguard
<mike.lifeguard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>I personally cannot imagine an US court accepting these number
>>as "fair use" and I cannot see any educational use of these quotations
>>legitimating an exception from our policy.
>
> I'm afraid I don't understand how we reconcile the principle that WMF is
> supposed to provide freely-licensed content, and the Wikiquote project is
> apparently chock-full of so-called fair use. This is far worse than simply
> incorporating fair use media (which is not permitted on many projects for
> principled reasons). I can understand a Wikiquote containing quotes which
> have fallen out of copyright and I think such a project would be wonderful.
> But using fair use to compile quotes seems to me to be a bad idea regardless
> of how many there are. So whether a court would accept a fair use defence is
> rather immaterial to me - I am more concerned with the principle of having
> an entire article/page of solely fair use content. For a WMF project, this
> seems nonsensical.
>
> Mike
>
>
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Exactly. While there is certainly merit in collecting free quotes
(mostly from the public domain), it makes no sense that such
blanket fair use would be seen as acceptable to the core mission
of providing _free_ content.

We have a policy to limit fair use media, why not one for text?

-Chad

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