[WikiEN-l] Non-free images, there has to be a better way

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/4/05, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
> I entirely sympathise. Personally, I don't see why we have to run
> around deleting images with non-free licences from Wikipedia when we
> have Commons for the fully free licences. What is the reasoning behind
> removing all of these images? Apparently my user page image is going
> to be deleted because I refuse to release it under a free licence (as
> opposed to used with permission).

Mark, the goal of the project is to make a free encyclopedia. When we
speak of free we speak of freedom and not price.
There are already many good unfree encyclopedias, and you can even
obtain access to them at no cost.

Every non-free image we incorporate potentially puts many people who
use our content in the intended fashion in a legally precarious
position. This risk is not only extends to our users, but also puts
the Wikimedia Foundation that runs our servers in danger. Thus every
nonfree image and every insufficiently tagged image we incorporate
reduces the freedom of Wikipedia. This is simply unacceptable because
in a large enough scale it defeats the purpose of our project.

There are places where the law in most of the world will permit us to
use some images which are mostly free because of the nature of our
use. However since this use is only permissible in a very limited
scope and in a way which applicable world wide, this use also reduces
the freedom of Wikipedia and should be avoided even though it is
permitted by the law where our servers are operated.  Because in some
cases we can not adequately do our job without borrowing some
copyrighted content in a way which is legally permissible, we continue
to permit these images but they must be tagged as such and they should
be replaced should a replacement become available. Through these
measures we mitigate the harm to Wikipedia.

Mark, I understand the uncomfortability of your situation, but
Wikipedia's goal of providing content that people can easily use
freely without risk of running afoul of the law superseeds our desire
to be liberal in what we permit our editors to store on their
userpages.  I would encourage you to locate an offsite webhost and
provide your unfree content via external link.