Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
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.
This was the argument I had initially advanced (on meta:Do fair use
images violate the GFDL?), but I no longer am convinced it's true. Fair
use seems to be a very oddly-constructed case in which it's difficult to
tell *exactly* what applies, but it appears to be the case that
copyright law simply doesn't apply at all to fair use situations. Since
the GFDL relies on copyright law, it thus can't really have anything to
say about fair use. For example, short quotations of literature are
fair use. Presumably the GFDL does not intend to prohibit any GFDL'd
works from including short quotations from literature? Since afaik fair
use is fair use, if that's permitted, then fair use images generally
must also be permitted.
I do agree that some fair use images violate the spirit of the GFDL, and
should be discouraged. For example, if something is only barely fair
use for us, and only because we're a non-profit organization with an
educational mission, that has the effect of making the document non-free
for all practical purposes, unless the images are stripped out, while
the entire point of the GFDL was to make the document free for all
purposes. But things like short quotations from literature, or very
famous news photographs, and so on, that would be fair use for most of
our users, seem like they should be okay.
-Mark