This could have the effect of greatly reducing the images available for use, particularly those of high quality and/or limited availability. I recently have been up against such an issue when trying to find some good photographs of whale images for the sperm whale and blue whale pages (the blue whale page has resorted to using a postage stamp as its main image). It turns out any underwater photos of these creatures - let alone good ones - are in very short supply. After a while of searching I found the stock agency http://seapics.com which has many fantastic pictures you'd have trouble finding elsewhere (while not a fair comparison, to get an idea try searching for sperm whale or blue whale at seapics.com and then try the same at images.google.com). I'm now writing a letter to seapics (snail-mail still has an extra value sometimes :) to try to obtain explicit permission for use on wikipedia. These folk sell images for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on use (some info at http://seapics.com/information/clients/pricing.html). Due to the high exposure, allowing just one of their images to be used in wikipedia would be a significant donation to wikipedial; to be honest I don't think I have a particularly good chance of success here. **But** if I couldn't guarantee credits where used, I could be pretty sure my chances would be nil. My understanding is that we currently accept images with credit required when used, so changing this policy would also mean a massive amount of work. I'm strongly in favor of allowing credits inside the article, but discouraging it - favoring images where the copyright holder has no such requirements. --Iain [newbie]