Is reprinting a figure “fair use”?

When Shelley Batts wrote up a report on an article about antioxidants in fruits, she never expected to get contacted by the copyright police, but that’s exactly what happened. She had reproduced a table and a figure from the article, and got this notice from an editorial assistant at the publisher:

The above article contains copyrighted material in the form of a table and graphs taken from a recently published paper in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. If these figures are not removed immediately, lawyers from John Wiley & Sons will contact you with further action.

She was appalled, and let the blogosphere know about it in this post. But she also did exactly what the publisher asked: she removed the figure and the table from her blog, replacing them with hand-generated versions she created in Excel. Should she have gone to all that trouble to comply with the publisher’s demands? Doesn’t the “fair use” doctrine allow reviewers to use excerpts from a work in critical commentary? Unfortunately, the copyright code isn’t as clear as it ought to be on this issue. It says that “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” That seems clear enough, but here are the considerations the code lists to be used in determining whether a reproduction of a work qualifies: