On 12/21/06, Iain Huxley <iain(a)mindspike.com> wrote:
Shouldn't
photo credits be allowed *only* in the image description page?
I don't see why images would have a special
status when compared to text
contributions, the credits for which are found also a click away, in the
edit history.
This could have the effect of greatly reducing the images available
for use, particularly those of high quality and/or limited availability.
I recently have been up against such an issue when trying to find
some good photographs of whale images for the sperm whale and blue
whale pages (the blue whale page has resorted to using a postage
stamp as its main image).
It turns out any underwater photos of these creatures - let alone
good ones - are in very short supply. After a while of searching I
found the stock agency
http://seapics.com which has many fantastic
pictures you'd have trouble finding elsewhere (while not a fair
comparison, to get an idea try searching for sperm whale or blue
whale at
seapics.com and then try the same at
images.google.com).
I'm now writing a letter to seapics (snail-mail still has an extra
value sometimes :) to try to obtain explicit permission for use on
wikipedia. These folk sell images for tens or even hundreds of
thousands of dollars depending on use (some info at
http://seapics.com/information/clients/pricing.html).
Due to the high exposure, allowing just one of their images to be
used in wikipedia would be a significant donation to wikipedial; to
be honest I don't think I have a particularly good chance of success here.
**But** if I couldn't guarantee credits where used, I could be pretty
sure my chances would be nil.
I'd say your chances of getting a stock agency to license its images
under any free license is pretty much nil. You might get
Wikipedia-only permission, but that's not good enough.
My understanding is that we currently accept images
with credit
required when used, so changing this policy would also mean a massive
amount of work.
I'm strongly in favor of allowing credits inside the article, but
discouraging it - favoring images where the copyright holder has no
such requirements.
I agree with this part completely. And I back this up with what I do.
When I get people to license images under a free license, I always
try first to get permission under Sharealike 1.0, which has no
attribution requirement at all. But barring that kind of permission,
I think it's perfectly acceptable for an author to require attribution
within the work itself, and not on some click-through page.
Anthony