2008/12/22 Jiri Hofman hofmanj@aldebaran.cz:

Is it correct to provide direct inline (inside the text of the article or infobox) iterwiki links to these images (and generally files)? For example: [[:en:File:Metallica and justice for all a.jpg|Image in English Wikipedia]]. Is it something what should be avoided because it can potentially violate the law or our license?

Question: what would we say if someone, for example, did a direct link like this to an image held on Amazon? The situations seem fairly comparable...

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Jiri Hofman hofmanj@aldebaran.cz wrote: [snip]

As you probably know, some Wikipedias provide fair-use content (as en) which is not allowed in some other Wikipedias because they want to satisfy also local laws not allowing fair-use, not just laws of the USA. Because of that a lot of articles in these Wikipedias do not contain certain images used in en as fair-use.

I don't believe the characterization of desiring to satisfy local laws is all that accurate: Any industrialized nation without some kind of legal provision for fair use would be paralysed without some comparable notion to fair use— and in fact many of the language Wikipedias which deny fair use have matching countries which very clearly do have some analogue of fair use.

Rather, most deny fair use because they believe it brings them closer to the princlples of free content underlying Wikipedia. (And it's pretty indisputable that in many cases it has this effect, although at a cost…)

Is it correct to provide direct inline (inside the text of the article or infobox) iterwiki links to these images (and generally files)? For

[snip]

This is a question of local project policy, but I would suspect that the answer is No, you're basically evading their content rules. These projects want you to find or obtain freely licensed images, talk people into releasing under a free license, etc.