David Gerard wrote:
On 24/09/2007, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Considered ethical by a vocal few who have the stamina to impose their views everywhere? Certainly not. By a majority of Wikipedia editors? I don't know. By publicists who would love to have high-quality (if copyrighted) images disseminated widely? Certainly yes. By a majority of our readers? Certainly yes.
So target the publicists. Show them an awful free-content shot, point out to them that releasing a good promo under this handy list of acceptable licenses means a better pic on a top-10 website and the number one reference site.
Ayup. A fine idea.
The reason I don't do that is, well, because I'm too lazy. And while I could rouse myself if it was important, this particular task just seems so... unnecessary, both for me and those publicists.
I'm pretty sure most of them thought they'd given us (and all the rest of the media) high-quality press photos we could use already. Yeah, they were copyrighted, but with terms that said, "permission to use for publicity purposes hereby granted in advance." I'm pretty sure they didn't receive explicit permission requests from every little newspaper and magazine and concert promoter in the world that ever used one of those photos; I'm pretty sure they would have been annoyed and/or overwhelmed if they did.
But now we come along and say, "Oh, no, that's not good enough for *us*. We need you to choose new licensing terms from our handy list, here. What, you haven't heard of Creative Commons or the GFDL? We thought everyone had by now. But you should do it, it'll be better."
It's true, we're big enough now we'll increasingly get away with it. But (while I have no great love for some of those big entertainment companies) I can't help but think that they're going to have to spend thousands of dollars getting opinions from their high-priced lawyers before they can be sure it's better for *them*. Oh, well.
Anyway, I'll stop whining now. Most of the images I upload are PD-by-me, anyway. I don't care *that* much about pop-culture publicity photos, and while I think the encyclopedia is poorer without them, I've long known I don't have the stamina to lobby for them (and a few other seemingly reasonable fair-use cases) in the face of the indomitable few who are bound and determined to get rid of them.
Also, before I go, I'd like to apologize to readers of this list for the way half of this thread got sidetracked onto some bizarre tangent involving banned-editor craziness. I have no idea what that was all about, and it's certainly not what I was intending to bring up when I started the thread.