Steve Bennett wrote:
On 5/22/06, Keith Old <keithold(a)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