[WikiEN-l] First fair use criterium

Mon Dec 11 02:43:50 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 12/8/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> It is an explicit goal of the project to produce an encyclopedia of
>> free content. Fair use images are not free. Thus it is harmful because
>> the explicit goals of the project define unfree content as a
>> non-solution.  The fact that other factors may make the harm
>> preferable to other harms does not change the fact that unfree content
>> is a harm.
>>     
>
> Let's paraphrase into parable language:
>
> "The explicit goal of the project is to acquire a collection of
> apples. Therefore, every time someone gives us an orange, this is
> harmful to our project."
>   
Except that we have people who argue that the project is really to 
acquire a collection of fruit, and see no reason to acquire apples 
because "we already have the oranges, and they taste better anyway".

A number of people on the fair use policy pages have explicitly declared 
that they consider the free content goal to be secondary at most. I 
suppose it's fortunate that they haven't started lifting text from other 
websites en masse...

Stan