On Sat, Sep 20, 2003 at 12:22:59PM +0900, Fedor Zuev wrote: > Discussion, AFAIK, was not about fair use in general (which > is very vague concept and yes, in this vague form exists only in US > and, maybe, China), but exactly about quotation of small strings > from manual in help strings, menu item descriptions and similar > objects.
That's not quotation, that's re-use. Quotation would be if the help string said "The Emacs manual says that this thingamajig will toggle the frobnicator". If you use "This thingamajig will toggle the frobnicator" directly as the help string then you're not quoting anything, you're re-using some text from the Emacs manual. A single line like this would be too small to matter, but Emacs has thousands of thingamajigs to document. Richard Braakman
