Talk:Archive:Fair Use Policy, Media

Although the middle of the doctrine is murky (in that there are a lot of unresolved questions) there are certainly some very clearly delineated instances of fair use. There is no question, for example, that quoting five or six lines of text from a novel in order to make a point about the author's writing style falls squarely within the protection of the doctrine.

There is no legal requirement that a person claiming fair use needs to first attempt to obtain permission from the copyright owner. That is probably good policy if you anticipate that some copyright owners will release their works into the public domain. I would be a bit leery about the possibility that a copyright owner may wish to set conditions on the use of their work, but that's for another policy page I suppose.

Finally, I'm a big fan of the public domain, and would like to remind people that anything published in the U.S. before 1923 is in the public domain, as is any work for which the author died before (at the moment) 1936. This applies equally to photographs. There are just enormous quantities of illustrative images in the public domain.

Cheers, Brian Dean Abramson 05:07, 8 May 2007 (CDT)