I was wondering if there is some kind of organized effort to ask photographers and image agencies for donations (read: GFDL- or CC-licensing) of images. I am thinking especially of images that we cannot take ourselves; dead celebrities for example (and no, don't go grave-digging ;-) There must be a huge amount of photos that have next no no commercial value anymore, because they are not good enough for a magazine cover, but would do well for documenting an encyclopedia article. Of course, we would prominently credit the source in the image description (which will be transcluded to every wikipedia that uses it), or even in the image title. Images could be watermarked, of course, and for largeer amounts of photos, we'd create a category, gallery and all. Repeaded mentioning (in a good light!) in a project of the wikimedia magnitude might be worth more than paid advertisement, fo virtually no cost. We could even offer a service: I'm sure some of us have (semi-)professional film scanners (I do). Deal goes like this: mail us your films (encyclopedia/commons-style only; not your family picknick;-) and a note that releases them under GFDL/CC/PD/whatever, and we'll upload them in high-res on commons, where you can download them. Free film digitization! With people on commons obviously interested in media, there must be some of us with ties to "the industry" who can initiate such contacts. "The Yorck Project" already donated a lot of PD images, as you might remember. If we can get just a few photographers/companies to release images as well, others might follow just to not lag behind. Magnus _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l