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