jkelly(a)fas.harvard.edu wrote:
It seems to me that this represents a philosophical
shift away from a
radically open-licensed project. Nor is it clear to me that the desire to
decorate ones userpage with official logos should be driving precedent. I may
be confused about the mission of our project, and am hoping that by posting
this to the list those users who have more history with Wikipedia's
relationship to unfree copyrights might do some thinking about the situation.
I have a photo of myself on my user page declared "fair use" for the
sole reason that I don't want it to be freely redistributed. The photo
was taken by a good friend of mine, and I'm sure I could talk him into
releasing it under whatever license I asked for, but for privacy reasons
I would prefer it if that photo (and other such images) were restricted
for use within the Wikipedia community, and were kept out of the article
namespace or any other publications.
I was surprised to find a deletion template on the image, but frankly,
I'd prefer to see it deleted than have it freely plastered all over the
web. Hopefully, however, Wikipedia can find some compromise between the
copyleft fundamentalists and those like me who believe that a
psychological separation between public and private space is important.
Given the objections to the posting of meetup photos which have arisen
at the past, I don't believe I'm alone. I think this concept of a
balance between freedom and privacy is one which could use some more
discussion.
-- Tim Starling