Hello!
Thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately, non commercial licenses
(that is, licenses that do not allow commercial reuse, like the one
you selected) are not allowed in Wikipedia. This is because Wikipedia
wants to have content that is "free" (as in freedom, and not free as
in "free beer") for anyone to learn, modify and redistribute, for
commercial and non-commercial purposes, worldwide. The best licenses
compatible with Wikipedia nowadays are the GNU Free Documentation
License, the Creative Commons Attribution and the Creative Commons
Share Alike. It may seem contradictory that Wikipedia, aiming at free
content, asks contributors to accept the fact that the content itself
could be used commercially. However, in the true spirit of being
"free", it is only natural to do so.
In example, Wikipedia offers all its data for others to use. Several
mirrors like About.com and Answers.com use information from Wikipedia,
adding ads, which is considered using content from Wikipedia for
commercial purposes:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visions_of_Atlantis is the original
article about "Visions of Atlantis"
* http://www.answers.com/topic/visions-of-atlantis is the version of
the article held at answers.com
* http://en.allexperts.com/e/v/vi/visions_of_atlantis.htm is the
mirror held by AllExperts, a site maintained by about.com
Other examples are the CD version of Wikipedia (2,000 articles were
compiled in a CD which is distributed for a fee to those who do not
have access to the site) or the future printed version (which is to be
distributed in places either without computers or without
electricity), which in some locations can be considered a commercial
use of the images.
As I said, although it would be really nice, we don't really need to
include album or single covers, just band images, and not all images,
just one image per band. And not even a high resolution image, a
smaller version would also be useful. And finally, not even a updated
image, it can be a year or two year old image. It is very likely that
an image with these restrictions will _still_ be better than the best
fan made picture.
Again, I hope I have clarified the necessity of allowing commercial
reuse of the content. I know this is asking a little too much,
especially when considering promotional material has always been
considered for non commercial purposes. However, it is also my belief
(I hope a shared one) that releasing a promotional image per band
under a free license does not damage the ability of Napalm Records to
make profit from the others (and probably not even the free image
itself) or to effectively use them to promote the bands in question,
as the free images th emselves will be used in articles through the
hundreds of mirrors Wikipedia currently has. In Internet, nowadays,
only MySpace and YouTube are better advertising than Wikipedia.
Best regards,
Roberto X
