[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

[Tomasz Wegrzanowski]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 09:08:34PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
> Stan Shebs wrote:
> 
> >Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> >
> >>>There is clearly no consensus to delete images we have permission to 
> >>>use.
> >>>
> >>
> >>But we obviously don't. I can't legally print it with the article and 
> >>sell it,
> >>so it's not acceptable.
> >>
> >What makes you so sure about that? Are you a copyright expert, or have 
> >you
> >gotten a statement to that effect from a copyright expert?
> 
> I'm not a lawyer, but that interpretation seems consistent with the "do 
> fair use images violate the GFDL?" discussion.  Fair use images, it 
> appears, do not in fact violate the GFDL, because they're a special case 
> of conditionally-public-domain material, so the GFDL doesn't apply, 
> because copyright law does not apply.  But with special-permission 
> images, copyright law *does* apply.  And the GFDL explicitly prohibits 
> editing a GFDL work by inserting non-GFDL'd components.
> 
> There is the aggregation defense that has been alluded to, but I think 
> inserting an image in-line in an article is clearly making it part of 
> the article as one work, not merely distributing it on the same medium.  
> If all the images were on separate pages (as in an appendix, perhaps), 
> then that'd be another matter.
> 
> So, in my non-legal opinion, I don't think we can legally include 
> special-permission images in GFDL'd articles, as doing so is a violation 
> of the GFDL's "all edits must also be GFDL'd" requirement.
> 
> (Again, fair use and public domain images excepted.)

The point of fair use is that '''certain use''' is fair, not arbitrary use -
and the copyright still applies. And this effectively restricts what can be
legally done with a work created using both GFDL and fair use material,
and thus breaks the GFDL.

So we need to separate nonfree content somewhere else, and then we can claim
it's mere aggregation.