Caroline Ford wrote:
So what do we do? I prefer tagging of all images, so that fair use images can be removed by a non-US user. However I am strongly favour of keeping images used with permission, as these greatly improve the encylopedia's coverage of non-US topics and people. If we only used PD images of politicians we would only have US politicians, and images of national leaders shaking hands with US presidents (from the survey we did yesterday). This would appear to be a bias, and could also been seen as POV as a country's relationship with the US is often controversial.
Well, there's no particular reason that other countries have to have less-free copyright policies than the US. As long as the US is the only one willing to give up copyright on its images, we'll of course have more US images---this is a direct result of most other countries adopting restrictive licensing and copyright rules. Perhaps non-US Wikipedians should lobby their countries' governments to follow the US's fine example in placing federal government material in the public domain. =] I'm quite positive that if, say, the French government decided to place their national archives in the public domain, we'd import anything of interest quite quickly. But if they insist on a restrictive, non-free licensing scheme, then I don't see what we can do about it: it's their choice to purposely exclude their material from any Free encyclopedia, and we have to respect that choice.
I hope tagging, allowing separation is a compromise. The status quo is chaos.
Tagging, I agree, is definitely something that should be done. No matter what we decide, it should be possible for a reuser of our content in an easy, automated way to, for example, strip out all non-public domain or GFDL images (as going through them all manually is prohibitively tedious for most reusers).
-Mark