Andrew Gray wrote:
The issue is that a British author entered into a contract made legally under British law to do something in Britain. This is by no means a bizzare or inhuman contract - "I will let you into private property, and let you take photographs, on the condition you don't use them commercially". Art galleries everywhere do much the same thing; it's nothing to do with copyright or draconian privacy laws, it's just a matter of a contract between an individual and an organisation.
So regardless of any legal situation in the US, it is a breach of contract *on the part of the author* to release those images for commercial use, even if he does it outside the UK. US copyright law doesn't come into it, US freedom of speech doesn't come into it, because it isn't about either - it's about the fact that the author has made a contract which is legally binding and *he personally* would be breaking it if he released the work under a free license.
Wikimedia is fine - we're not a party to the contract, and it's an open question as to what on earth the other party can do to us if the photographer decides to break his contract. But we should never be pretending we can get people out of their local legal constraints, unrelated to copyright, just because publishing in Florida gives us funky copyright possibilities.
I agree with all that, but the question remains whether *we* should enforce those contracts. We of course can't get the other person out of their contract, but we don't have to police their contracts either.
In the World Cup example, at least, Commons seems to have decided that it's not our job to enforce them---it's between FIFA and the photographer whether the pictures were taken in violation of a contract, and not really our job to pry into the matter, even if we suspect they were probably not taken with permission.
I'm not sure that's a position we *must* take, but it does seem to be the one we're currently taking. There are problems with the opposite position, too, that would at least require us to come up with something more complex/nuanced. For example, we'd probably want to reserve the right to publish pictures taken illegally in complex political situations---if somebody snapped a newsworthy photograph during a coup, for example, which the government later declared illegal, we would probably not want to take it down for that reason (or at least I wouldn't want us to have such a policy).
-Mark