On 12/5/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Not quite. The current climate is that we accept nothing but free images.
This is not the case on en.
Fair use is not free, so we're stamping out fair use. Licensed-for-almost-anyone-to-use publicity photos are not free, so we're stamping out those, too. I'm sure magazine covers and DVD packages will be next.
We've been through magazine covers once already.
And this isn't necessarily such a bad thing. Certainly, accepting only free images, and upping the incentive to acquire free images, by declining to accept nonfree ones in the meantime, is a noble goal.
I started this thread talking about publicity photos, but it became clear to me that this is not the fundamental issue, and I suspect it's not even worth debating publicity photos until the fundamental issue is resolved (or changed).
The people campaigning to get rid of all nonfree images have got Jimbo's statement to fall back on: it's better for an article to have no image at all than to have a nonfree one. A licensed publicity photo of J.D. Salinger is not free, ergo it's better for the [[J.D. Salinger]] article to have no image, until such time as a free one can be found.
Stated another way, not only does a poorly-composed fan shot of an author at a book signing trump a professionally-photographed headshot, an imageless article trumps that headshot, too.
Assumeing a fan pic is in fact posible. Clearly it unlikely that there is going to be a free pic of say [[Stella Rimington]] for the next 50 years.