On 8 Feb 2010, at 23:05, Ken Arromdee wrote:
This is also a particular problem with pictures of living people, since we've been told that since it's *possible* to take another picture of a living person, all non-free images of living people are prohibited. The official way of interpreting "it's possible to" takes no consideration of just how possible it is. In any other context this would be considered rules-lawyering-- we're basically officially rules-lawyering our own policies.
Personally, I think we should remove all non-free images from all language Wikipedias (and everywhere else they occur) - as they make it difficult to get freely licensed content off people that already have that content. Case study: I emailed ESA to ask for a photograph of a satellite to use in an article; they provided a 200 pixel image I could use as 'fair use' in return. In the past, we weren't big enough to have any leverage to get that content released - but now we are, and we could have that leverage if we want to take advantage of it.
However, that is somewhat separate from the question of images that are in the public domain _somewhere_. It is somewhat crazy that US laws dictate what public domain materials you can upload to Wikipedia etc - irrespective of what laws apply in your own country.
One possibility that might be worth investigating is something like Wikilivres - which holds books that are out of copyright in Canada (life+50 years) but not in the US. It can do that as its servers are based in Canada. Could we do something similar with Wikimedia Commons? i.e. host multimedia content on a server in a different geographical area, and then have that linked in with Wikipedia in the same way that Commons currently is? There shouldn't be any concerns about having thumbnail images of these works on Wikipedia, as these are all done under fair use anyway (e.g. all of those uncredited CC- BY-SA images...).
Mike