David Rodeback wrote:
Second, please note that we linked directly to images
at wikipedia's
site not in an effort to steal bandwidth, but out of respect for
your bandwidth. It seemed -- and to me still seems, I must confess
-- a very respectful alternative to trying to spider all the
images. After considerable exploration, we were able to find no
available alternative at Wikipedia for obtaining images, and no
clearly defined contact for making inquiries.
I'd like to ask that this block on worldhistory be dropped
immediately, as David has a point here, and he's being very courteous
to come here and chat about it.
Since I am paying for bandwidth, not the other Wikimedia Foundation
donors, and since I'm not worried about this right now, we can be lax
about it. Perhaps we could even unblock the others on a theory of
"innocent until proven guilty".
Let's brainstorm about this problem, because it's increasingly common.
I think we should eventually (but sooner rather than later) have a
tarball of images. Inside the tarball there should be a
README.Licensing that explains in plain English what's going on, and
we should include a copy of the GNU FDL and what not. The license is
complicated and tricky to apply in a case like this, in my opinion.
The problem is *not* as some might suppose the "fair use" images.
Those are o.k. for us to distribute under the doctrine of fair use,
although it's only fair to warn re-users that they need to think about
how fair use might apply to whatever it is that they are doing.
The problem is possibly with the attribution and history requirements
of the license and so on. It's too early in the morning for me to
really consider what would be involved exactly, but we all know the
drill.
--Jimbo