Mark, the goal of the project is to make a free encyclopedia. When we speak of free we speak of freedom and not price. There are already many good unfree encyclopedias, and you can even obtain access to them at no cost.
Wikipedia has passed the stage of being comparable to other encyclopedias you can access at no cost.
Often the images we have appropriated from the internet are poorly suited to our needs. In many cases they have other distracting objects in the image, or otherwise fail to clearly illustrate the point which needs to be made. Wikipedia would be much better off if the majority of our images were created with the intention of illustrating an encyclopedia.
This argument is getting a bit tired. Do you have an [[IBM 360]] in your backyard? Do you have a [[Z machine]]?
If Wikipedia isn't getting enough photographs, we should reach out and encourage more photographers to join our community. A lack of content isn't an excuse to break the law.
No-one is suggesting we do.
Every non-free image we incorporate potentially puts many people who use our content in the intended fashion in a legally precarious position. This risk is not only extends to our users, but also puts the Wikimedia Foundation that runs our servers in danger. Thus every nonfree image and every insufficiently tagged image we incorporate reduces the freedom of Wikipedia. This is simply unacceptable because in a large enough scale it defeats the purpose of our project.
It is a simple matter for downstream users not to include images tagged used-with-permission. Wikipedia articles very rarely rely on the images in their main text.
And I can sympathise with people who don't give a rat's toenail for the current downstream users, much as I believe in the GFDL.
There are places where the law in most of the world will permit us to use some images which are mostly free because of the nature of our use. However since this use is only permissible in a very limited scope and in a way which applicable world wide, this use also reduces the freedom of Wikipedia and should be avoided even though it is permitted by the law where our servers are operated. Because in some cases we can not adequately do our job without borrowing some copyrighted content in a way which is legally permissible, we continue to permit these images but they must be tagged as such and they should be replaced should a replacement become available.
This is confusing to me. It's *fair use* that's currently allowed - and *that* only works in the US. It's *used-with-permission* that's forbidden and that will work anywhere in the world. I'd argue fair-use is much more dangerous to world wide publication than used-with-permission is.
And, sadly, it seems that Jimbo's fatwah against UWP has increased the number of far-fetched rationalizations for fair use on Wikipedia.
Regards, Haukur