Fair Use: Ditto

Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle got a nasty letter from a publisher over a blog post in which she reproduced a part of a figure and one data table from a paper. It's more than a little surprising to me that the publisher thinks this is a good use of their time, but who knows? Maybe they're overrun with "Editorial Assistants" and have them trolling through blogs in order to keep them out of the editors' hair.

Anyway, like most of the rest of the ScienceBlogs crowd, I think this is kind of ridiculous. One graph and one table certainly seems like it ought to fall under the "fair use" exception to copyright, given that the whole point of the article was a critique of the paper's findings. Of course, most of the SciecneBlogs crowd has already posted about this, too, so I don't really have anything to add. Just count me as another person who thinks this is a stupid overreach on Wiley's part.