Used-with-permission images, a modest proposal - WikiEN-l

4 Jul 2005

...
    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. 
 Well I can't speak for others.
 In general I believe we should never feature a picture not produced by
 a Wikipedian. The behind featuring works is to show the best we have
 to offer, not the best we've found someplace else and are
 redistributing. :) 
That's certainly a reasonable opinion. But whether
or not it's featured the fact remains that we're
using it. Look at this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:LindisfarneFol27rIncipitMatt.jpg

You'll see that there's a link to the British Library
page from which the image was snatched. Following that
link you'll see that the British Library claims copyright
on the image. As far as I know this may well hold up
under British law (evil as that would be).

This may conceivably get someone publishing Wikipedia
in Britain, even just mirroring it on a British server,
into trouble.

Using used-with-permission images will not get Wikipedia
into trouble. With all such images properly tagged it would
be simple for downstream users to avoid mirroring them.
And if they needed particular images they could always
apply for permission for themselves.

Of course I agree that we should get free images wherever
possible. But in a few cases it may not be. The Z machine
picture I keep coming back to will not be easily replaced
(and I doubt the lab will release it under a free license).
Nor will the deleted IBM 1360 images.

As for the idea of restoring the IBM 1360 pictures using
a "fair-use-and-used-with-permission" tag - I think that
nicely illustrates my point that disallowing used-with-
permission will encourage shady "fair use".

And if "permission" is useful after all, as Michael says:

...
  the fact that we have permission bolsters our claim to
fair use
 ... it is very useful to note that we have permission. 
Then I don't think the image upload text should discourage
users from trying to get permission - as it currently does.

Overall I think that a few used-with-permission images are
far less harmful to the universal distributability of the
project than over-reliance on the U.S. legal code.

I'm not talking about thousands of pictures here - more like
a few dozen we may not be able to replace. That's something
we can easily keep tabs on and provide appropriate warning
labels for downstream users. We can use any number of methods
to quarantine these images and strictly limit their use.

How about a voting mechanism? Anyone proposing we use a
new used-with-permission image must obtain a consensus
that the image is sufficiently useful and hard to replace
to justify a used-with-permission exception. That is my
modest proposal.

Regards,
Haukur