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