On Monday 23 February 2004 12:30, Jimmy Wales wrote:
That's a pretty typical publicity still, and a guy like Bob Keeshan must have literally hundreds of these taken over the course of a lifelong career in show business. The picture itself has very little commercial value in and of itself, and I can see no particular reason why Bob Keeshan's estate,
or CBS (where his show appeared for 30 years)
or one of the wire services (who might own photos of him taken at various public events)
or some paparazzi with a huge collection
might not want to make just one or two representative images available under a free license.
We won't know until we try.
Absolutely right.
And this is one more thing that makes me a bit afraid about "fair use" images. The motivation for writing one or two emails to get a really free image needs a lot more effort and work than just taking the image and using it under "fair use" doctrine.
In many situations, like the above for example, it could be a typical win-win scenario. We could offer adding a "generously donated by foo" text to the image and would get a free image in return.
best regards, Marco