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

[Jimmy Wales]

Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Fastfission wrote:
> 
>> The more I think about this, the more I think that sitting on ~20,000
>> copyrighted images is a time-bomb waiting to go off.

I don't necessarily agree with this, but I wonder if someone could be so
kind as to post some statistics on our number of non-free images.  We
should probably have an agreed-upon set of numbers here to guide our
deliberations.

How many images do we have which are tagged as {{fair use}}.

One problem that I ran into the other day when I started exploring some
of the categories is that we have images which are released under
multiple licenses in a somewhat nonsensical way.

For example, releasing an image under CC-BY and CC-BY-NC is senseless.
CC-BY-NC grants a strict subset of rights of CC-BY.

In the case that I was looking at, the image was listed in the non-free
images category, but...

I saw another image which was "by permission" and also tagged as GNU
FDL.  That was confusing.

> It probably
> makes sense if we are to have a separate article for each Disney
> character that each such article would have one necessarily free use
> image of the character.

Did you mean to type "fair use" here?

I am happy to contribute a photo of Mickey Mouse which I took myself
while visiting Disney World in Florida.  While there might (conceivably,
but doubtfully) be some complex issues related to copyright in the
character, I think this is a very very "clean" fair use as compared to,
for example taking a scan of a drawing directly from Disney or (worse)
simply downloading an image from a Disney website.

It will be quite a bit easier, if we are pressed (unlikely), to defend a
photo of a Disney character taken by a Wikipedian, than it is to defend
a jpeg hoisted from a website.  Easier legally, I am not sure, I defer
to the judgment of lawyers on that point (and I doubt if they really
know since the amount of fair use case law which covers this point is
not so large to my best knowledge).  But easier from a public relations
point of view, no doubt.

And we are big and important enough now that the PR point of view is
totally relevant.

> The straw that breaks the camel's back does not function in isolation.

Very good observation.

It is my position, speaking generally, that we ought to crack down quite
a bit on "fair use", not because there are any legal problems with what
we are doing now, but because it makes it harder for people to reuse in
jurisdictions with bad fair use provisions, and because an excessive
reliance on fair use tempts us to be lazy about creating freely licensed
alternatives.

But for now, I think the first campaigns for cleanup should be (1) any
remaining untagged images and (2) the elimination of non-free (such as
"by permission") images.

--Jimbo