User blog comment:Godisme/Fair Use and Image Licensing/@comment-3431115-20111105152934

Actually, I think this blog post does not do a good job explaining what "Fair Use" really is about.

What it boils down to is that someone can claim to be using a copyrighted work "fairly" by detailing why it is "necessary" to use the work, and how usage of the work does not take away from the ability of the copyright holder to still profit from the work.

To that end, the person claiming "fair use" can, among other things, show how the part of the work that is being reproduced is just a tiny fraction of the whole copyrighted work - and that is what the fields "portion" and "resolution" are about.

If, for example, the copyrighted work is an episode of a tv show, you'd state that you are "just" using a single frame, and in a reduced resolution - thus making it a tiny fraction of the whole work, and not something that will make the copyright holder lose money.

Similarly, "replaceability" is not about whether the image can be replaced with a random other - the statement here should make clear that it is necessary to use a copyrighted work because it would not be possible to replace the image with a free one.

Bottom line: just plugging standard phrases into the available template fields does not lead to a proper "Fair Use" rationale - quite the opposite: asking for higher resolutions of an image if images being used should rather be as low-res as possible might show that the person claiming "Fair Use" didn't know what exactly he was doing there.