Wikipedia:Restricted image licenses

Legal matters and licensing issues are not for the community to decide. Please take the matter up with the Wikimedia Board.

Wikipedia has always had a policy in favor of free (in the sense of unrestricted) content. Our text contents are all licensed under the GFDL. (See Wikipedia:Copyright.) Our images have a more varied set of licenses. Many are under the GFDL. Some are under CC-by-SA, some are in the public domain, and many are used under fair use claims. At one point Wikipedia accepted images under "used by permission" and "no-commercial use" licenses, but we have not done so in some time. There is good reason for this. Many ways in which we might wish to redistribute Wikipedia content, or allow others to do so, are, at least technically, commercial use. This was covered at greater length in a recent thread on the Village Pump.

Finding images that can be used under these terms remains tricky in many cases. Many image creators and copyright holders are unwilling to release images under the GFDL when it means that others might latter use them for commercial purposes unrelated to the informative mission of Wikipedia, although they might not object to technically commercial uses involved in a redistribution of Wikipedia articles, or modified versions of those articles.

Proposal

I therefore propose a revised policy: that Wikipedia accept images under a license which restricts the purposes for which the images can be used, while not restricting commercial use as such.

Specifically, I propose that the following license terms, or similar ones be considered acceptable:

The image is an Image of X. It is copyrighted by Y It is licensed to Wikipedia, and to reusers of Wikipedia content, commercial or non-commercial, under the following terms. 1) The copyright notice must accompany the image. 2) If Y has provided contact information or a web address, that information must also accompany the image, or be in some way associated with it, so that viewers of the image have the contact information or web address available to them. 3) The image may only be used to illustrate an encyclopedic article, or informative account, of X, or in which X is mentioned, or an informal discussion in which X is mentioned (such as a wikipedia User page) or otherwise to illustrate or represent X in connection with some discussion or description of X. 4) Any user of the image must allow others to reuse the image on the same terms. 5) All reusers must provide a link or URL to the Wikipedia page from which the image is derived. 6) The image may be modified, but if modified, the modified image is to be considered a derivative work of the original image, and is subject to the same copyright, and must be released under the same license. (User:DESiegel/Limited use is a draft of a template which could be used for such images.)

(Note: the above wording is merely a draft. if this proposal is approved, it should be reviewed or re-drafted by soemone with appropriate legal qualifications. DES ^(talk) 22:30, 19 December 2005 (UTC))

Arguments in favor

The key point is number 3, the rest is not very different from the GFDL or CC-by-SA copyleft licenses. Point 3 restricts use to illustrations of the subject. It would not allow the image to become part of a collage, for example or of an abstract work of art, and it would make it very hard to use the image as part of an advertisement, or in some way unconnected with its original purpose. But it explicitly permits commercial use in any article or discussion where the subject is referenced.

This means that any Wikipedia fork or mirror or commercial distribution could use the image, as could any author writing about the subject. Indeed it is hard to think of a use that most Wikipedians would consider proper and expected but which would be restricted by this license; but the (perhaps unfounded) fear by some content owners that images on Wikipedia would be used by commercial firms as a replacement for stock photos, or to illustrate advertisement quite unconnected with the original subject of the images might well be allayed by this limitation. Some institutions which freely make images available for "non-commercial" or "educational" use might be willing to accept this license as a substitute, although it is considerably less restrictive then either of those conditions.

It is my view that the use of this license would not restrict any reuses of the kind Wikipedia normally wants or intends to encourage, and would assist us to attract images from a number of copyright holders who are unwilling to provide them under our current license terms. I therefore ask for community support for this proposal. DES ^(talk) 04:14, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Arguments against

Such images could not be freely reused by anyone for any purpose. This slightly restricts the "open content" nature of Wikipedia, but far less than fair use images. DES ^(talk) 05:06, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Lack of images is no big deal. So what if certain articles don't have images? - Jmabel | Talk 03:57, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Discussion

(Please discuss on the talk page.)