On 8/1/06, jkelly@fas.harvard.edu jkelly@fas.harvard.edu wrote:
Another technical solution might be to impose terrible resolution on unfree images, which itself could be switched off (perhaps by bureaucrats) when there is a real need to (as, for instance, with the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons). If the default was for unfree content to be less aesthetically appealing than freely-licensed content, we wouldn't have editors constantly replacing freely-licensed images with unfreely-licensed ones.
We can always resize fair use images to make them smaller. Most images are displayed in articles as thmbnails no larger than 300px in width (although images with landscape orientation are sometimes larger than this), and I think that it would be reasonable to downsize most images to this resolution or smaller.
Certainly anything which is in the same proportions as a standard photo print or a computer display would not need to be any larger than 300px.
I doubt there would be any copyright implications with adjusting images like this, if all we do is make them smaller - we're simply using less of the copyrighted work. It would be as if we scanned or copied the source at a lower resolution in the first place. Similarly cropping images would be a modification with no copyright implications. It would be important not to make any other modifications though.