I think Wikipedia funding lawyers to defend fair use interpretations of copyright is actually a very useful function to support the encyclopedia. I know it sounds stupid, but there are a lot of lawyers out there looking to make a buck off a stupid lawsuit, and copyrights on the internet are a pretty wide open field for this kind of nonsense. In order to defend things like fair use that should be obvious someone needs to pay the legal bills. This is a lot of what the EFF does and it generally strikes me as a rather important force in the context of American Civil Rights law.