[Foundation-l] Fair use being badly abused on en.wikipedia

Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton at gmail.com
Mon Jan 7 19:03:54 UTC 2008


> But I think we have to ask ourselves,
> every time we use content that has not been freely licensed, is this
> something we're ready to *pay* to go court over?
>
> This is a different question from asking whether we'd win any given
> case.  I assume without much uncertainty that we'd win a fair number
> of them -- in theory.  But we're not in the position of going to court
> to win even the cherrypicked, obviously winnable cases.

When assessing risk, you need to consider not only the cost of
something going wrong (in this case, clearly quite high), but also the
chance of it happening. How far would a policy of complying with all
but the most outrageous cease and desist notices go towards reducing
that chance? In other words, would be a good idea to not worry about
the borderline fair use cases until someone complains? What's the
chance of us ending up in court even after removing the image in
question?



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