[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

Thu Feb 19 23:35:15 UTC 2004

Caroline Ford wrote:

> So what do we do? I prefer tagging of all images, so that fair use 
> images can be removed by a non-US user. However I am strongly favour 
> of keeping images used with permission, as these greatly improve the 
> encylopedia's coverage of non-US topics and people. If we only used PD 
> images of politicians we would only have US politicians, and images of 
> national leaders shaking hands with US presidents (from the survey we 
> did yesterday). This would appear to be a bias, and could also been 
> seen as POV as a country's relationship with the US is often 
> controversial.

Well, there's no particular reason that other countries have to have 
less-free copyright policies than the US.  As long as the US is the only 
one willing to give up copyright on its images, we'll of course have 
more US images---this is a direct result of most other countries 
adopting restrictive licensing and copyright rules.  Perhaps non-US 
Wikipedians should lobby their countries' governments to follow the US's 
fine example in placing federal government material in the public 
domain. =]  I'm quite positive that if, say, the French government 
decided to place their national archives in the public domain, we'd 
import anything of interest quite quickly.  But if they insist on a 
restrictive, non-free licensing scheme, then I don't see what we can do 
about it: it's their choice to purposely exclude their material from any 
Free encyclopedia, and we have to respect that choice.

> I hope tagging, allowing separation is a compromise. The status quo is 
> chaos.

Tagging, I agree, is definitely something that should be done.  No 
matter what we decide, it should be possible for a reuser of our content 
in an easy, automated way to, for example, strip out all non-public 
domain or GFDL images (as going through them all manually is 
prohibitively tedious for most reusers).

-Mark