Steve Bennett wrote:
On 5/22/06, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
Has anyone ever tried contacting Lucasfilm and seeing what they will allow us to use?
Dear George, We understand that no one has ever been allowed to legally produce or sell an image of Han Solo without your permission. However, would it be ok if we copied such an image, and put it on our website with the proviso that anyone is allowed to download, modify, sell, distribute, or do anything they like to it?
Look forward to hearing from you, Wikipedia
It's at least remotely possible that an image or two of limited quality would be given a free license, sort of like a "free sample"; several professional photographers have done just this on commons for instance. But I don't see that Lucasfilm currently has any incentive to relinquish control, given that pretending not to be aware of our maybe-maybe-not fair use leaves them with all rights intact, and it would be available as a way to hassle WP if, say, our captions weren't sufficiently admiring or something. :-)
If en: scrubbed out all nonfree images top to bottom, and if it was clear that it was a choice between text-only and donated images, the donation might seem worthwhile. But we would have to be utterly ruthless - none of this making of exceptions for "historic photos" or whatever.
Stan