From Mindspillage
A statement to accompany Wikimedia's licensing policy, which actually changed very little or nothing in substance, but which made it explicit, and clear that this was the position of the WMF.
Because licensing has been an active topic in the community, we discussed the issue at the recent Board meeting in Rotterdam; thank you to those whose thoughtful input furthered the discussions.
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain. For content to be "free content", it must have no significant legal restriction on people's freedom to use, redistribute, and modify the content for any purpose.
It is important that all projects under the Foundation umbrella support those standards, not only because of our desire to enable the creation of free reference works, but because of our commitment to allow those works to benefit everyone who wishes to use and reuse them. Because of this, all media we allow on the site must be free for all users and all purposes, including non-Wikimedia use, commercial use, and derivative works. (Some media may be subject to restrictions other than copyright in some jurisdictions, but are still considered free work.)
There are many different licenses that allow these freedoms. The licensing page on the Wikimedia Commons, <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing>, discusses some of these license terms and gives links to the many licenses that are acceptable to use.
While we appreciate the goodwill of those who give permission for Wikimedia to display a work, it does not fulfill our greater purpose of giving others the freedom to use the content, and so we cannot accept media with permission for use on Wikimedia only. Derivative uses are also important. The value of allowing modifications becomes clear to anyone who edits the projects, as new work builds on the work of others, and work you cannot change to meet your needs and purposes is not free.
Commercial and non-commercial use is more controversial, as many people are concerned that allowing commercial uses allows others to abuse their generosity. But ultimately we believe, as do many other organizations devoted to free content, that not allowing commercial use does not provide significant benefit to the user or the creator. NC licensing stops many valuable uses that help distribute and support free works, and does not further our mission. Where commercial use spreads the works without taking away others' rights to use and distribute them for free, it helps our purpose of making the content as widely available as possible. This is a long enough message without going deeply into detail, but Erik Moeller's essay at <http://www.intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC> is a thorough and clear explanation of the reasons why the harm is more than the benefit, and so why noncommercial content is not something we use.
For these reasons, all media on Wikimedia sites that are used under terms that specify noncommercial use only, no-derivatives only, or permission for Wikimedia only, need to be be phased out and replaced with media that does not have these restrictions.
Some Wikimedia projects use media that is not free at all, under a doctrine of "fair use" or "fair dealing". There are some works, primarily historically important photographs and significant modern artworks, that we can not realistically expect to be released under a free content license, but that are hard to discuss in an educational context without including the media itself. Because the inability to include these works limits scholarship and criticism, in many jurisdictions people may use such works under limited conditions without having license or permission. Some works that are under licenses we do not accept (such as non-derivative) may meet these conditions.
Because of our commitment to free content, this non-free media should not be used when it is reasonably possible to replace with free media that would serve the same educational purpose.
Since individual projects have differing community standards and there are potentially legal issues in different jurisdictions, individual projects may choose to be more restrictive than Foundation policy requires, such as the many projects that do not allow "fair use" media at all. However, no project may have content policies that allow licenses other than those allowed on Wikimedia Commons and limited fair use.
We hope this clears up some of the uncertainty about what types of material may be uploaded to the projects and why we've taken this position.