The goal of the project is not to produce an encyclopedia with content that is free for some people for some uses.
But that's exactly what's happening as long as all the focus is on U.S. laws. Fair use won't protect you if you're publishing Wikipedia derived content in Denmark. Nor will Bridgeman v. Corel.
Recently a picture of the Lindisfarne Gospels taken from the British Library website became a featured picture even though the BL explicitly claims copyright on it and that claim may well hold up in a British court.
In my opinion there's nothing wrong with Wikipedia using that image even if non-encyclopec down-stream users can't. I'm sure they would allow a Wikibook too if you ask them. If you can get them to release it under CC-BY that would of course be great. And if you can get a PD image of a z-machine which is as good as this one I salute you.
Well, the policy of Wikipedia disagrees with you, and has for a fairly long time.
I know. And I will abide by it. But I will also argue that it should be changed.
No-one in this thread has suggested we break the law.
Fair enough. Pardon my tunnel vision, because the vast majority of images being canned right now are not cases where we have been given permission and in those cases people are suggesting we break the law.
Fair enough. I'm sure this is a stressful job and I applaud you for doing it.
As I said, if the images are not tagged it is impossible short of having someone read all of the image texts and removing a lot of images that are free but left untagged.
Agreed. But if we properly tag everything the technical problem is a minor one.
Downstream work which is visable to you, there is a lot of substanital downstream work which isn't useless and in any case we are not providing freedom if we exclude even the stupid mirrors.
I don't want to exclude stupid mirrors or anyone else. If a neo-nazi wants to publish Wikipedia content modified to a nazi POV that's fine with me as long as she respects the GFDL.
But I hope you'll agree that we have a visibility problem here. We're losing the excellent Eastern Yellow Robin.jpg because its author won't release it for use outside of Wikipedia, due to concern about stupid commercial mirroring.
We should by all means try to highlight the positive reuse that the GFDL allows.
With permission isn't a lame excuse, it's a good one.. but it's still not one we can always accept.
I'm arguing that in many cases it is no worse an excuse than the U.S.-specific legal niceties currently tolerated.
Regards, Haukur