On 7/4/05, Mark Ryan ultrablue@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.