On 16 July 2010 08:53, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
One of the problems, though, is that the founding principle that content must be freely licensed has resulted in large swathes of images being declared forbidden (because you would need to pay to use them and you couldn't freely redistribute them). There are also freedom of panorama considerations that lead to many images being excluded that many people not familiar with how this varies from country to country expressing surprise that pictures of modern statues and buildings in public places in some countries are not allowed on Commons.
This is a problem that, in large part, eventualism will solve. I say that because our hard-arsed policies relating to free content have *directly* caused the freeing of quite a lot of content that wouldn't have been otherwise. Indeed, the US government bias you note has been a most useful thing to point out to countries that don't free up government works.
en:wp does allow quite a few historic images under fair use. And no, they're not safe. But we're in this for the long haul, not a pretty page today.
- d.