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

Sat Jan 12 07:55:50 UTC 2008

On Friday 11 January 2008 22:55, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
> "normal people from a select few commonwealth states". Fair use is not
> a ubiquitous international right, and in many cases, there are people
> who can't reuse our content because they are not permitted to use fair
> use materials.

Someone who lives in a jurisdiction that does not allow fair use and wants to 
use images could simply and easily ignore fair use images. By the same 
argument you could argue for removing all quotes from Wikipedia because they 
are fair use too.

> Pictures of fictional characters from old or obscure television shows
> do not. There is a difference between images which are necessary, and
> images which are used purely for decoration. The decoration images
> should be removed.

I see a bias here against old and obscure TV shows. Why should fictional 
characters from new and famous TV shows be illustrated with images, and 
fictional characters from old and obscure TV shows not be?

Seriously, fictional characters are a good case for fair use. You can't really 
convey meaningful information about them if you don't show how they look.