Fair use

I see another thread here is discussing stolen photographs. For the pages in question the DMCA applies, which allows for "fair use". It got me wondering if there is any use of a photograph that might constitute fair use? I think for some countries (as here in the UK?) there are clauses which allow news reporting as fair use (not sure how it works in practise).

(I don't expect legally-robust answers from an online forum so don't worry about prefixing your responses with "IANAL".)

I am a lawyer, although I don't play one on television. Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation, although it is U.S. law only.

Perhaps the biggest Fair Use exemption is to be able to use copyrighted material for educational purposes. Journalistic purpose is another.

Well, the easiest way to prevent any unauthorized use is to slap a big COPYRIGHT label across the body of the photogragh and to disable the ability to copy an image from a webpage--LJP

The most disturbing thing I saw on the site was the claim by the "photographer" that they were HER photos!

Ain't nothing in the world fair about a claim like that. It's pure, disgusting, downright theft.

Actually, Larry, disabling the 'right-click' feature to copy an image really does little to prevent theft. The Print Screen function is still available. And the image will still be sitting on the person's hard drive in their web cache.