>On the Commons side of things, I think there has been an over-aggressive campaign to extract "license compliant" images from Flickr and other >non-WMF repositories that include subjects who were very unlikely to know that their image was going to be made available on Commons. I >believe that whoever uploads those images to Commons has a personal responsibility to verify that all of the subjects in those images was >aware of, and agrees to, the licensing terms.  I also believe that it should become part of the process  that prior to uploading such images, the >person uploading to Commons confirms with the Flickr uploader that the terms of the license are correct, and that there are suitable model >releases where applicable.

 

This has always been one of my concerns about the superordination of free licensing in our image policy, both on Commons and enwiki. Any other issues with the image are downplayed in favor of archiving all the free images possible. I am not sure, for instance, that many of the Flickr users whose pictures have been used are quite aware of what the CC license means. Some of them seemed to think at one point that it was the only way to make their pictures publicly viewable, or did so because of peer pressure to do this good and cool thing without really understanding the legal implications.

 

I have often wondered what we do if confronted with a situation where there was a notable person with plenty of good-quality copyrighted images, but the only free one would be one that was rather unintentionally revealing (upskirt, say) while still showing their face. Could some editors insist on using one of the copyrighted images in that case even though the NFCC would not allow it because an equivalent free image was available?

 

Daniel Case