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@jacobat @thomasfuchs These companies claim that their use of copyrighted material is just fine -- that it falls under the "fair use" exemption in US law.

This *may* be true (in terms of being found in court to qualify as such), but if so, the law needs a refresh. "Fair use" was historically a way to allow a person or organization to take a *small amount* of copyrighted material to comment on it, or cite it in research, or make a parody or other highly-legally-protected form of derivative work. It has not, up until now, been invoked on a scale of "essentially all copyrighted works available publicly on the Internet".