[WikiEN-l] Technical solution to bad fair use

[Fastfission]

On 8/3/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> That actually sounds fairly plausible. I'm an expert on LA paparazzi
> after having seen a half-hour documentary on them. One thing I recall
> was that a good clean photo doing something fairly controversial (eg,
> drunk outside a club) was worth in the $500 range. A shot of a
> celebrity just not wanting to be shot was like $100, and a posed
> celebrity shot was like $50 or less. And all this is presuming that
> the photos would be published in the week or so afterwards.
>
> The chances of a photographer having old (2-3 years), boring, plain
> "Hi, my name is Paris Hilton" shots lying around that they would hand
> over for "not much" sounds pretty good to me. We just need to work out
> what exactly we can offer them in return.
>
> To that end, we could improve our crediting system. We could
> explicitly say "Wikipedia thanks the following professional
> photographers for their graceful contributions". I don't believe that
> would be at all contradictory to our mission.

The only problem there is that it treats the "professionals" in a
different category than the "amateurs", which I think it somewhat
against the philosophy of the place. If WP allows "professionals" to
have their name listed (and with a link to their website?), why
wouldn't it let "amateurs" list theirs on the same page? Pretty soon
it could also devolve into a spam page, the only requirement being
contribution of a photograph.

Maybe that's not a problem, though. At least there would be SOME
requirement. Actually, perhaps one could set the requirement --
contribute photographs to Wikipedia which can (and are) used in
articles and you get to put your name and link on a page for
contributing photographers. I don't know if anyone would go for that
(either Wikipedians or photographers). It's somewhat of an equivalent
of selling ad space, except services rather than money would be
transacted. Might be a bad precedent, might lead to some unpleasant
arguments ("I contributed 5 pictures of my rear to Wikipedia for the
'buttocks' page, why can't I list my website here?"). Just thinking
out loud here.

But even without a centralized credit facility we could make it easy
for photographers to quickly set up Flickr-like user pages for
themselves where they would have their contact information, a link to
their web page, and a list of all free photos they've uploaded to
Wikipedia and what articles they are used in. If we set up easy-to-use
templates for this it might make it look even more attractive. We
could remind them how high a pagerank Wikipedia has, and that their
photograph would be used in an article which showed up on the first
Google search page in most cases.

I think we have a lot to offer in terms of exposure and attention,
even without modifying our system one bit. If we found some way to
send a "Hey, want to contribute some of your old, unused photos to
Wikipedia?" message around, perhaps it work on its own merit, if it
was worded well and presented the pros and cons in a straightforward,
no-B.S. fashion.

What they have to gain: free exposure on a high-pagerank, high-traffic
site with a professional apperance (no pop-up ads); regular
contributors would be more than welcome to have a link to their own
website listed on their userpage along with samples of their
contributed images.

What they have to lose: very little -- releasing under a viral license
like CC-BY-SA would not only require attribution for re-use, but would
require all re-use to be itself licensed under a free license, which
their normal clientele would not be doing, so they are not competing
against themselves; the pictures are likely not going to be doing much
sitting at the back of their files gathering dust, and pictures which
would be too "boring" for professional use would actually be
potentially ideal for Wikipedia, which is somewhat
anti-sensationalistic.

FF