[Foundation-l] Clickable images

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 9/9/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> By the way if anything your argument
> is an argument against images that can not be freely displayed and copied.

A requirement for attribution is not a prohibition against free use
and redistribution.

Attribution, by itself, is a basic activity which any honest and
ethical distributor will be careful to perform with due care even when
not required to by copyright licenses.

So long as the default state of copyright is all rights reserved
mandatory attribution is a fundamental requirement for any license
which attempts to use copyright to prevent content from being removed
from the commons. If the attribution and at least basic licensing
information are not brought along with the work it becomes far too
likely that the information will be lost and the work will fall out of
availability to the public.

The attribution and licensing data provided one click away already
causes us a little resistance from some photographers who would rather
see a distracting by-line attached to every illustration of theirs.
What we do today is uniform on all of our pages (with a few
exceptions, for example the frwiki main page), and is consistent with
our behavior for text. It is likely the minimal acceptable thing we
can do both from both the perspective of license conformance and from
the perspective of behaving honestly. Hiding the attribution behind
multiclick secret handshakes just isn't going to fly.

I think it is important that we keep any discussion centered on the
actual problem: Our image behavior is surprising when we use images as
parts of navigational elements.  This isn't an issue over free
content, and any attempt to turn the discussion into a crusade to
establish a new (and ultimately self defeating) definition of free
content is just going to be a waste of all our time.