(This policy stuff should really be over on wikipedia-l, not here,
so I am cc:'ing).
Toby Bartels wrote:
It came up long before in discussion of album covers.
It seems doubtful that our usage of these images
is truly "fair use" in the first place
(a separate issue from whether it violates the GFDL).
It doesn't seem doubtful to me. See Kelley v. ArribaSoft on
thumbnails:
http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/IP/copyright/kelly_v_arriba_soft.htm
And also: "On the other hand, in Nunez v. Caribbean International News
Corp.,*fn22 the First Circuit found that copying a photograph that was
intended to be used in a modeling portfolio and using it instead in a
news article was a transformative use."
It's a very complicated issue, and although I've spent many hours
reading court cases, I still can't say with any certainty on lots of
questions.
But the album cover example seems pretty squarely fair use.
It shuts out hardly any users, relatively speaking,
since it doesn't shut out any readers or writers.
What it shuts out is forkers, and others that would reproduce Wikipedia.
This is why it's important that we not claim that all image files
are covered under the GFDL, since many are no such thing.
IOW, it's the separation of the free images from the proprietary ones
that we need to be working on.
This I agree with completely.
Also, *where possible*, and I think this is more cases than people
commonly realize, we should be replacing fair use images with pure GNU
FDL images.
--Jimbo