[WikiEN-l] Non-free images, there has to be a better way

Mon Jul 4 16:11:49 UTC 2005

On 7/4/05, Maury Markowitz 
[snip]
> Really, I couldn't have done anything more. LLNL WANTS me to use these
> images in the wiki.
[snip] 
> Why? This is still a complete mystery to me. If we have permission to use
> them, why not use them?
[snip]

First, I'd like to extend you my gratitude for actually expending
effort to find out the copyright status of your images and to clear
them. Far too many users just grab images off the internet and expend
little to no effort to determine their true copyright status.

The reason we can not use 'by permission' images is because the
permission is usually limited enough that it is incompatible with our
goals.   For example, a permission on an images of a partical
accelerator might say "you may use this image in wikipedia", but where
does that leave us when we want to use the image in the "How to build
your own particle accelerator" wikibook?  Another example, a common
'with permission' is something like "you may use this image on the XYZ
article on the Wikipedia.org website, as long as you provide a link
back to us", so where does that leave someone who wants to build an
offline copy of wikipedia for use in computer labs in some third world
nation?

Quite simply we can not accept general 'with permission' images
because they are not sufficiently free.

In some cases someone may have actually managed to get with permission
language which is sufficiently free, but it doesn't match one of the
small set of licenses we accept and consider free.  If we had many
such images any user of our content would have to hire a team of
attorneys to consider every case... Our work can not be free when it
comes with such a costly burden. As a result we may even decide to
remove some images with sufficient permission that we could rightly
keep just because it doesn't fall nicely into one of our existing
licenses.

There are new instructions which instruct users to obtain permission
under one of our existing licenses to avoid running into these issues.

I'm sorry that our policy had to change, ... we can't get everything
right the first time.