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"What is Wikipedia? 
Wikipedia is a project to produce a new kind of encyclopedia that is 
comprehensive and _free_."

[emphasis by me]

For me "freedom" is a very important part of the Wikipedia project. By 
allowing images under the "fair use" rules Wikipedia is not completely free 
anymore. 

> but I won't. It's a matter of balance 
> -- what freedoms do you lose? You might lose the freedom to take all of
> Wikipedia's images and sell them as the "Coca Cola photo collection" for
> 50 bucks. Big deal. As I said, having the respective flag in the "image"
> table would be sufficient for any third party to easily filter out images
> which contradict commercial use.

No, you lose much more. You can not easily combine the content of two "free" 
encyclopedias and get something that is "free". You can not copy images from 
the English Wikipedia to the German Wikipedia anymore because the "fair use" 
right works not this way in Germany.

And worse of all you discourage people contributing really free 
images--"because we already have the 'fair use' ones". 

You can call this "stupid" - but I don't think that it is worth to give up the 
freedom of Wikipedia for a few more images. 

> How do you propose acquiring a free photo of a prominent,
> recently deceased author or actor? A picture of an important historical
> event? This is unrealistic -- you won't, and with your attitude, we will
> simply have no image for that article, while Encarta et al. will sport a
> nice gallery of them. Unacceptable.

So be it, then we have to image for that. 

Linux had no 3d support for a long time--"unacceptable" some said, but 
nevertheless Linux survived and is now stronger than ever before and more and 
more companies write nowadays GPL code for Linux.

I hope that we are some day in a similar position that companies are proud to 
add some images to the free encyclopedia. In my humble opinion we don't have 
to "win" against Encarta in the multimedia sector, Microsoft can win this one 
easily considering how many image and video rights they own.

>[...]
> No, I am thinking very much about how Wikipedia will look 10 years from
> now.

I think it is safe to say, that we all do.

<sarcasm>Who removes the "free" from the FAQ?</sarcasm>

best regards,
  Marco


P.S. Erik, thanks a lot for your great articles you have written for heise. 
They are very well written and of great value even for someone like me who 
thought that he knows quite a lot about wikipedia.

-- 
Marco Krohn
Theoretical Physics
University of Hannover