On 9/9/06, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
By the way if anything your argument is an argument against images that can not be freely displayed and copied.
A requirement for attribution is not a prohibition against free use and redistribution.
Attribution, by itself, is a basic activity which any honest and ethical distributor will be careful to perform with due care even when not required to by copyright licenses.
So long as the default state of copyright is all rights reserved mandatory attribution is a fundamental requirement for any license which attempts to use copyright to prevent content from being removed from the commons. If the attribution and at least basic licensing information are not brought along with the work it becomes far too likely that the information will be lost and the work will fall out of availability to the public.
The attribution and licensing data provided one click away already causes us a little resistance from some photographers who would rather see a distracting by-line attached to every illustration of theirs. What we do today is uniform on all of our pages (with a few exceptions, for example the frwiki main page), and is consistent with our behavior for text. It is likely the minimal acceptable thing we can do both from both the perspective of license conformance and from the perspective of behaving honestly. Hiding the attribution behind multiclick secret handshakes just isn't going to fly.
I think it is important that we keep any discussion centered on the actual problem: Our image behavior is surprising when we use images as parts of navigational elements. This isn't an issue over free content, and any attempt to turn the discussion into a crusade to establish a new (and ultimately self defeating) definition of free content is just going to be a waste of all our time.