Abigail Brady wrote:
With the respect to photos of politicians, which Caroline had been negotiating for, I doubt very much the parties would have agreed to put them into the public domain or licence them under the GFDL, but I suspect the main reason there is not fear of loss of revenue, but fear of the images being used in a derogatory way.
I wonder.
At least in the U.S., politicians are almost completely fair game for parody and satire. Completely separate from fair use is the "parody" exception to copyright. For someone to take a photo of a politician and alter it so that the politician looks like a moron is a cherised right of the people.
So refusing a free license for that reason wouldn't really make sense.
I suspect rather that any reluctance to release under a free license would come more from a lack of knowledge of the concept.
But here's a key. Wikipedia is more popular than Britannica. We are rapidly becoming a major cultural force. In many ways, it is a great honor to be featured in Wikipedia, and to have your photograph even moreso. But if the requirement for that is that you need to release your picture under a free license, that's a very small price to pay.
(It's actually no "price" at all.)
What does the politician give up? Nothing, because these pictures are not for the purpose of earning revenue anyway. They are publicity photos. What does the politician get? Guaranteed world-wide distribution in the most important general knowledgebase in the world.
We should not underestimate our power, which grows daily.
--Jimbo