[WikiEN-l] overzealous image deletion?

[geni]

On 12/5/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> Not quite.  The current climate is that we accept nothing but
> free images.

This is not the case on en.

> Fair use is not free, so we're stamping out fair use.
> Licensed-for-almost-anyone-to-use publicity photos are not free,
> so we're stamping out those, too.  I'm sure magazine covers and
> DVD packages will be next.
>

We've been through magazine covers once already.

> And this isn't necessarily such a bad thing.  Certainly,
> accepting only free images, and upping the incentive to acquire
> free images, by declining to accept nonfree ones in the meantime,
> is a noble goal.
>
> I started this thread talking about publicity photos, but it
> became clear to me that this is not the fundamental issue, and I
> suspect it's not even worth debating publicity photos until the
> fundamental issue is resolved (or changed).
>
> The people campaigning to get rid of all nonfree images have got
> Jimbo's statement to fall back on: it's better for an article to
> have no image at all than to have a nonfree one.  A licensed
> publicity photo of J.D. Salinger is not free, ergo it's better
> for the [[J.D. Salinger]] article to have no image, until such
> time as a free one can be found.
>
> Stated another way, not only does a poorly-composed fan shot of
> an author at a book signing trump a professionally-photographed
> headshot, an imageless article trumps that headshot, too.

Assumeing a fan pic is in fact posible. Clearly it unlikely that there
is going to be a free pic of say [[Stella Rimington]] for the next 50
years.

-- 
geni