On 1/21/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Knowing Wikipedia's reach and reputation, why would a content owner refuse a reasonable free use license over something as trivial as an image of an album cover?
Probably the same reasons many Wikipedians refuse a reasonable free use license for images of themselves. Two major ones are fear the image will be altered in some way that will harm them and a desire not to allow others to profit off of their hard work.
The latter reason isn't going to be resolved, but maybe there are some ways to appease those with the former reason. For instance, a license could be devised which allows an image to be distributed by anyone, unaltered, in an encyclopedia in any medium (some lawyer-minded folk would have to come up with a way to allow alterations necessary for the change in medium but not other alterations). Then this license could be allowed for some subset of images which are currently being used under fair use (album covers and publicity shots are two categories which immediately come to mind).
Anthony