On 10/31/02 11:37 AM, "Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Axel Boldt wrote:
I agree with Imran that fair use materials in a GFDL document are a problem. In essence we tell our readers "we grant you the right to do what you want with these materials, just follow the GFDL", but we are in no position to make such an announcement: we don't own the copyright to the fair use materials nor have we received permission from the copyright holder. Our readers *cannot* do what they want with them.
Like Cunctator says, invariant sections don't provide a way out.
There must be _something_ wrong with this analysis. If correct, then we can't even quote sources. We can't quote a single line from any book. That's obviously absurd, so there must be something wrong with it.
That is indeed the direction copyright law is going. That's the basic concept of DRM--that all uses of copyrighted material will be monitored and "properly" licensed. The legal argument is that the only reason that's not the way the current system works is because there isn't a good mechanism for licensing any bit of copyrighted material.
It's scary, but the trend *is* toward having to license even single lines from books.
Our only useful argument is to say that something that brief is uncopyrightable.
As to Axel's suggestion:
In essence, the image then becomes a separate document from the rest of the article, with a separate license. It may not be completely clean and is not very pretty, but I think it's the only thing we can do.
That looks like a violation of the GFDL. It's a clearcut violation of the spirit of the GFDL, and may also be an explicit violation. The Document is expected to be self-contained.