On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 08:44:00PM -0800, Michael Snow wrote:
From a legal standpoint, a separate site might be okay. To be safe, I would avoid anything that allows non-GFDL images to be printed or downloaded together with GFDL text.
It probably satisfies most moral concerns, but some purists might still say we're being intellectually inconsistent by promoting free content and using non-free images in any form.
From a practical standpoint, shouldn't our energies be focused more on finding images that qualify as free content, rather than keeping images we can't use right now? Also, I doubt the site would get used much at all. Many users would continue with the default of uploading directly, even if we decide to segregate fair use images elsewhere.
Why not just tell people that if they have non-GFDL images, use an external link? We already have quite a few of these for paintings and other museum-type content. A lot of the pictures are from the Internet anyway, and there are other places to host stuff besides Wikipedia.
Having non-free images (and other content) on separate server, and only for linking seems like nice Debian-style compromise solution.