On 2/8/07, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote:
Greg said:
The ESA has chosen a copyright policy which limits the freedom the world can take with work, presumably they have good reasons for this, but their decisions have negative consequences as well. One of those negative consequences is a reduction in how widespread information of their work can travel, and Wikipedia is just a single symptom of that.
Fine with me, but the same is true of museums or heirs of artists who chose not to allow free reproductions of their works of art.
There cannot be two rules, two measures. One of the negative consequences, for an artist, the heirs thereof, or museums or libraries or whatever owning rights to the works, of not allowing free photographs, is to reduce exposure of these works to the world, and thus deprive themselves of a kind of advertisement on a site in the first pages of Google. They'll have to assume that.
Thus, again: Why that exemption for so-called "modern art"?
We can, as fair use, use images of a copyrighted work to discuss the copyrighted work so long as we're not going to get a free image and of course such images don't belong on commons.
So for example, I don't see why we couldn't use the Giotto mission's image of the Halley Comet on the article about the [[Giotto mission]], because an image of it's copyrighted output is important to understand its mission.. But we should probably not use the same image on [[Halley's Comet]], since NASA provides many free images.
Incidentally, while looking for an example for my reply I noticed that may enwiki articles for ESA subjects have free images. For example take a look at [[ERS-1]]. After seeing all these I really wonder if we haven't been misthinking our approach to ESA images.