Edit 2024/The legal basis of the English Wikipedia's fair use policy explained: 2024/Main Page

This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2024.

Outside of copyright law, fair use ("fair dealing" in common-law countries other than the U.S.) is a concept poorly understood. Not all Wikipedians, even, are familiar with how it works, even as they may be familiar with its application to images through our non-free content policy. I myself (not a lawyer either, but I do work on a lot of law articles) was not familiar with the legal underpinnings behind some of its requirements until I began writing articles about some of the specific U.S. court cases that underlie those requirements. In this session we will explore the law of fair use in the U.S., both in statute and case law, how it affects the English Wikipedia's fair use policy and how it may in the future