Yes, but this BOLD argument has largely been dismissed
in favor of the CAUTIOUS argument which says 'we just
dont want to find out what "a court" (i.e. a U.S.
court) might say on the fair use issue, so we are
going to exercise extreme cautious in our application
of fair use, in any property-infringement claims.
Wikipedia's philosophy is like Debian's, which for
sake of purity will avoid loading Java, Flash player,
etc, and thereby will lose substantial end-user
'marketshare' to slick sub-distros like Ubuntu and
Mepis. Simply tagging fair use (should we going to
prune 'fair use' of text too?) would suffice, if such
would be integrated with the means to strip the
'non-free' matter from the 'free' version. The
non-free could even be a patch to the 'free' distro.
Stevertigo
--- Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
fair use says
nothing about public purpose. Now a
few excerpts would
be ok, but not the whole
thing. You can hear about it from CNN.
Actually, a number of copyright law commentators
have suggested that
"public purpose" may be a legitimate
restriction on
exclusive rights,
as a form of "fair use". The claim was
raised
inartfully in RTC v.
Henson, but I don't believe the court ever ruled
on
the merits of that
claim (mainly because Henson is a freaking idiot).
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