On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Hunter Peress wrote:
Over these last few months, it has been frustrating when GFDL righteous wikipedians nix each others images because of fear of copyright violation. This respect for the GFDL which is extremely vigorous, but I feel it is also very harmful to wikipedia.
Riiiight.
To alleviate some of this, we should allow the inclusion of offsite images. This is perfectley acceptable.
No, that's not acceptable at all. If you want something to appear inline, mixed into the page in Wikipedia, it should be *part* of Wikipedia. That means it should be hosted on the Wikipedia server, and be easily packaged with backups, distributions, and alternative published formats.
If you'd like to *link* to external images, just like any other external resource, that's A-OK, fine and dandy.
Take http://news.google.com for example, which is greatly improved by the addition of any image seen fit, also note that not a single image there is hosted on google. I emailed them, and they said that what they do eg: <img src="http://anotherserver/file.jpg"/> is completely within the realm of copyright policy.
Copyright is an unrelated side issue here.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)