2014-09-13 23:53 GMT+02:00 James Heald <j.heald@ucl.ac.uk>:

Yes.

Just to be clear, if we did "converge all the images to live in one place", I am not suggesting they would all be free, and I'm not suggesting they would all belong to Commons.

Just that they would all physically live in the same integrated structure; but one that would still appear to the external browser to have different 'partitions', corresponding to the different language wikis, each with a different base url.

(But inside the server all part of one integrated system, making it easy to move a file from a national partition to the Commons partition, or vice-versa -- *if* that was legally appropriate).

-- James.

If I can dream, I would say that we should only have Commons as file storage. All "local" exceptions would need to be deleted. Today I suspect that some users unknowingly makes copyright infringments because that we do allow "local" uploads. For example, if a Swede in Sweden would upload an image to enwp claiming American fair use it would probably not be okay since we do not have a similar law in Sweden (and since around 40% of the traffic from Sweden goes to enwp, Swedes would be expected as an audience).

But I realize I am in a minority here and will not pursue this further (but would cheer if WMF legal would).

/Jan