[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

Thu Feb 19 21:54:55 UTC 2004

Jimbo wrote:
>...
>If that means less images for now, then it means less images 
>for now. It also means that we have a very strong incentive 
>to develop free alternatives.

No it means that many things will *never* have images. For example, Dolly the
Sheep is dead. The only images of her are either from the news media or from
the Roslin Institute. Therefore I used the images from the Roslin Institute.
The license on those images states that they can be freely used in a
noncommercial setting so long as credit is given. I have done that. 

What we need is the ability to mark those image pages so that commercial
downstream users can easily exclude them. 

I really like the GNU philosophy, but the GNU license is a means to an end.
That end is, at least for me, to create the best encyclopedia on the planet.

And to do that we need to use some noncommercial grant, special permission, and
liberal fair use doctrine images.  So IMO, we should officially discourage the
use of these hindered images by encouraging freer alternatives, but we should
not ban them. We should mark them so that non-Wikimedia and/or commercial
downstream users can easily exclude their display in their versions of our
articles.

Text is a different matter since there is no easy way to exclude hindered text
for downstream users. So "fair use" in that regard must be limited to what a
commercial user could do (relatively short and clearly marked and attributed
quotations). 

-- mav

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