Thread:Ukjaybrat/@comment-452246-20130621160437/@comment-452246-20130621184409

Generally I believe it's assumed to fall under the "fair use " doctrine of US copyright law. There's no clear answer however as to whether something is fair or not. There are 4 considerations that help a judge decide if something is fair use:
 * 1) "The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes"... in our case it's for nonprofit educational purposes.
 * 2) "The nature of the copyrighted work"... whether's an image, or a text, etc...
 * 3) "The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole"... meaning that generally if you reproduce part of something, in particular for illustrative purposes, then it's better.
 * 4) "The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work"... in our case generally the game itself is being sold, with art/images being part of the assets.

Keep in mind that I've never heard of a game company issuing a cease-and-desist letter to a wiki, generally because wikis are fan-made and provide free advertisements. Wikis also tend to sample parts of images, and the art assets generally aren't suitable for inclusion in a derivative game (high-enough quality of complete enough).