They copyright policy adopted by the contributors to Wikipedia is more restrictive than strictly required by law. This is a good thing for two primary reasons: The first is that we have a commitment to Free Content where the law has no objection to us distributing content with outrageous restrictions, and the second is that a restrictive policy removes grey areas which make enforcement difficult. The existence of a strict policy encourages people to create free images where they are possible and has greatly increased the number of free images available to the world. An easy example is the articles on automobile models on enwiki... in the last year substantial progress has been made in creating and using free images and in many places this progress was directly driven by editors refusing to accept unfree images in the articles. However, there are a number of cases such as the recent thread on the image of Treanna where common sense would tell us to permit the image... that it represents no compromise of our goals and no legal threat. There have been quite a few examples that I've run into... The challenge is that if we permit this sort of decision making we find that for almost any image there is someone who will find inclusion reasonable. This is substantiated by the fact that we delete over 30,000 images per month on enwiki... after all, at least the *uploader* thought it was reasonable to inclued the image. A widespread permission to heed the 'common sense' of individual contributors in these matters would simply result in chaos and likely a massive regression in the overall freeness of our content. I would like to propose a solution: We should appoint or elect someone to make exceptions to our policy. Ideally this person would carry a strong commitment to keeping our content maximally free... but my view is that even if we appointed someone with poor judgement that the bad calls of one person are highly preferable to the bad calls of all our contributors. Much like the arbcom acts as a consensus tool to help us achieve consensus on bans and other such methods, a person in this position would help us achieve consensus for exceptions to our image use policy. They would not exist to make determinations on matters of policy, but only to permit things which are legally permissible, obviously non-harmful to our goals, but clearly against our policy. In this manner the strict 'bright lines' policy can remain, preserving the sanity of those who work to keep our content free, but we do not suffer the harm of rejecting material which would be permitted by common sense. Thoughts?