Axel-
Check out for example the excellent collection of portrait photographs donated to the Library of Congress.
Which one specifically?
Next, once our foundation has money, we can try to acquire the copyright of selected important images we need and cannot get in any other way.
The problem with that approach is that we need an exclusive world-wide license, since we need to allow unlimited redistribution and modification.
*non-exclusive*
Actually, what we need is probably a transfer of the copyright to us, or at the very least a contract that allows unlimited sublicensing. Remember, we want to allow forks, commercial re-use etc. This is what is so expensive, because it deviates from normal company licensing policies, where you are allowed to use a work *in your product*, but certainly not to give others the right to create and distribute derivative works.
This is *very* expensive for most professional photographs, and impossible for many.
So instead you suggest to simply take them for free, hoping that fair use applies?
My, what nice rhetoric. Next you are going to accuse me of "stealing" ;-). And this from someone who thinks intellectual property rights do not exist (your user page). See where this kind of mentality is taking us? Copyright paranoia.
What I do suggest is that we use common sense to determine the few cases where we think fair use law is applicable, instead of simply ignoring these few loopholes in the current restrictive copyright code. I would think that someone opposed to intellectual property would embrace the idea that we should defend and make use of our rights, instead of bowing to the pressure from copyright holders.
I think Brion's suggestion of simply linking to the external site containing the photograph is a win-win-win-win proposal:
- The copyright owner gets exposure
- Our readers get access to the educational content
- We are still able to burn a CD with all our material and put "GFDL"
on the cover
- The inconvenience of the external link encourages contributors to
hunt for free substitute photographs.
Alas, it also has several problems:
- When the website is down, the image is no longer available. Broken links often go unnoticed for longer periods of time because we have no way to systematically check them. - The image is no longer embedded in the proper context. It becomes difficult to associate image content with image text. - The reader is taken away from the Wikipedia navigational structure to a non-HTML image page. This is bad user interface design.
So the win/win/win/win situation becomes a win/win/win/win/lose/lose/lose situation, at which point I think it more convenient to refer to it as a suboptimal solution.
I do support this method of illustrating articles in cases where we believe fair use law not to apply, e.g. maps from Mapquest.com. We can agree that because of the risk of legal liability for Bomis.com
- fair use should be kept at a minimum, - in other cases, this method should be used, - the database should contain as much information about copyright status as possible.
But I do not agree with exclusively linking to copyrighted pictures.
Regards,
Erik