[WikiEN-l] Common sense exceptions to our copyright policy.

[Gregory Maxwell]

They copyright policy adopted by the contributors to Wikipedia is more
restrictive than strictly required by law.  This is a good thing for
two primary reasons: The first is that we have a commitment to Free
Content where the law has no objection to us distributing content with
outrageous restrictions, and the second is that a restrictive policy
removes grey areas which make enforcement difficult.

The existence of a strict policy encourages people to create free
images where they are possible and has greatly increased the number of
free images available to the world. An easy example is the articles on
automobile models on enwiki... in the last year substantial progress
has been made in creating and using free images and in many places
this progress was directly driven by editors refusing to accept unfree
images in the articles.

However, there are a number of cases such as the recent thread on the
image of Treanna where common sense would tell us to permit the
image... that it represents no compromise of our goals and no legal
threat.  There have been quite a few examples that I've run into...

The challenge is that if we permit this sort of decision making we
find that for almost any image there is someone who will find
inclusion reasonable.  This is substantiated by the fact that we
delete over 30,000 images per month on enwiki... after all, at least
the *uploader* thought it was reasonable to inclued the image. A
widespread permission to heed the 'common sense' of individual
contributors in these matters would simply result in chaos and  likely
a massive regression in the overall freeness of our content.

I would like to propose a solution:

We should appoint or elect someone to make exceptions to our policy.

Ideally this person would carry a strong commitment to keeping our
content maximally free...  but my view is that even if we appointed
someone with poor judgement that the bad calls of one person are
highly preferable to the bad calls of all our contributors.

Much like the arbcom acts as a consensus tool to help us achieve
consensus on bans and other such methods, a person in this position
would help us achieve consensus for exceptions to our image use
policy.  They would not exist to make determinations on matters of
policy, but only to permit things which are legally permissible,
obviously non-harmful to our goals, but clearly against our policy.

In this manner the strict 'bright lines' policy can remain, preserving
the sanity of those who work to keep our content free, but we do not
suffer the harm of rejecting material which would be permitted by
common sense.

Thoughts?