Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
If I were Jimbo, I'd be tempted to deliberately perpetuate an American stereotype and tell the National Portrait Gallery to kiss our ass and sue if they dare...but I'd perhaps want to get a real legal opinion first.
It is tempting, of course, but there are some puzzling additional issues here.
One of our goals is to keep our content freely redistributable as widely as possible. One unsettled question is the degree to which we are willing to alter our content to meet legal conditions which we regard as unjust.
Clearly, if we got an email from North Korea saying that any portrayal of their government in a negative light is illegal, and that anyone who redistributes our content there will get in legal trouble, we will just ignore it. Altering the political neutrality of our content is pretty much out of the question.
But it is less clear to me how we should draw the line when the issue is relatively minor, and relatively content-neutral. (To explain what I mean by content neutral: if we did not have these particular images, this would not introduce a major political or other bias in our articles in the same way that a demanded change of text would.)
When the issue is U.S. law, our hands are more tied than in other cases, but fortunately, in a wide range of cases it turns out that U.S. law is better than other jurisdictions, particularly given the fair use doctrine, the DMCA "safe harbor" provisions, etc. (But see my p.s. below.)
But I want people to be able to print books from Wikipedia content and then hand them out in the tube in London at rush hour if they like, so totally ignoring British law is not a viable option.
*We* are at no legal risk for hosting images that are public domain in the U.S. but not public domain elsewhere. But people who want to redistribute do not have that luxury.
--Jimbo
p.s. I would be interested in gathering examples of content that (a) we ought to have in the encyclopedia on editorial grounds but that (b) would not be legal for us to host in the United States.
To my knowledge, virtually all examples of content that is not legal in the U.S., but which *is* legal elsewhere, are not really relevant to our encyclopedic mission. The age of consent for models in pornographic pictures in the U.S. is 18 in the U.S., but lower in some other countries, but we don't publish pornographic pictures so this is irrelevant to us.