Jimmy-
The moral argument is the one that matters. Should we make use of materials that are available only to us because of our special circumstances, or should we follow a purist GNU philosophy?
We should strike a reasonable balance, and that means that images which are clearly unobtainable under a free license but historically important works should be used as fair use. Copyright law is restrictive enough as it is, it would be a big mistake not to exploit the few exemptions it grants us, under the guise of being "more free". In fact, by rejecting fair use, we effectively endorse restrictive copyright doctrines.
We have talked about this many times before, and I feel kind of bullied, to be honest. You know the arguments for and against and I thought we had found a reasonable compromise. Do the defenders of fair use images on Wikipedia have to reiterate their position every 12 months to make sure that *their* work is not destroyed, because our benevolent dictator suddenly orders mass purges of all fair use images?
I am referring to the *work* of obtaining relevant images and including them in the respective articles. I have scanned quite a few images specifically for Wikipedia myself. You are not just talking about some abstract issue, you are talking about people's time.
It is in our interest, as an encyclopedia, to make use of historically relevant images, and it is our interest, as an encyclopedia, to rely on the doctrine of fair use to do so. It is in our interest as an open content project to make sure that we do not rely on fair use where we could produce images ourselves. It is also in our interest as an open content project to make it easy for third parties to filter out images which they cannot legally use.
The solution, to me, therefore seems obvious: - Develop a process whereby it is determined if an image can be obtained by other means than fair use, and whether fair use is justifiable; - Tag all fair use images to allow easy filtering.
Regards,
Erik