Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Your language shows the sort of disrespect common from those who are unconcerned about the legal status of our project. There is no rabid frenzy to delete the image, rather, the deletions are going unacceptably slowly.
Just as a meta-comment, I think it's to be expected that people will be unhappy; now that I've crunched through a bunch of old images, I can see where there has been a lot of wishful thinking - "WP is a good cause, and this photo is perfect for my article, ergo it must be fair use". But all we need is for some professional sports photographer to see a pile of his/her work gracing articles uncredited (and unpaid-for), and we could have a Seigenthaler-type scandal on our hands.
So the process is going to be painful, and there will be mistakes, but we'll be glad we did it sooner rather than later. People who have images they care about can help out by going back to them and making sure they are brought up to present-day standards. Also, commons is now big enough that it frequently has good replacements; the "commoners" are steadily discovering new ways to collect free-license images, and so many of the old fair-use pics have no further value to us.
Stan