On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 8:58 AM, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:
Can you clarify -- who do you intend by "we"? If your answer is "English Wikipedia," I think we already have a somewhat workable solution to this complex problem: fair use is permitted in certain cases.[2] Of course, you probably mean something broader. But the solution English Wikipedia has chosen is available, by virtue of a WMF resolution,[3] to every Wikimedia project. So if fair use is the issue, why not simply propose permitting it at specific local projects?
The whole point of Commons is to serve as a central repository of shared images for Projects to use together. The same image on en.wikipedia and ru.wikipedia and es.wikipedia and the dictionaries and books and travel and...
The failure of Commons is that it's defaulting to a fuzzily defined highest common denominator on licensing.
What we need here is another shared image repo which is defaulting to the *lowest* common denominator on licensing. I.e., somewhere I can stick an image which is fair usable on en.wikipedia and make it available to all the other projects, even if it would fail Commons retention criteria.
It is in the combination of "the only common repository" and "highest common denominator" that Commons fails. I have no problem with Commons remaining as-is if we have an alternate lowest-common-denominator image repo that will automatically be searched for images as Commons is now.