User:Masem/drafts/simpleNFC

Wikipedia, like all of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects, is built around encouraging the development of freely distributed and reusable educational content. It is why we inform all editors that their contributions will fall into the Creative Commons so that their edits can be shared and used by others across the globe.

To that end, Wikipedia strongly encourages the use of images, audio clips, and other media that fall within an appropriate free license, including works that have fallen into the public domain, to augment are articles. Visual and audible media can help readers to better understand and appreciate the topic of interest.

At the same time, we recognize that articles on contemporary topics would also benefit from media to help with understanding. But in many cases, the media files available for these topics are not within a free license, and instead are copyrighted works that cannot be redistributed or reused by others, which rubs against our free content mission. While the idea of fair use says we can include these media files within certain limitations, this only applies to how these works are treated in the United States (where the servers are located), and does not automatically enable users outside the United States to redistribute or reuse those images.

Such copyrighted media files fall into "non-free" content (NFC for short), because of their inability to distributed and reused freely. This approach to non-free content is purposely more restrictive than United States' fair use allowances so that we are able to better serve free content to the global population without excessive non-free burden.

The Wikimedia Foundation has established a resolution that requires all projects, including Wikipedia, to avoid the use of non-free media, and where non-free media is deemed necessary, to minimize how much non-free is used. This has been developed in our non-free content policy for the English Wikipedia. Key points of this policy are, briefly:
 * If you have a media file where it is possible that a free media file could be used for the same purposes, you cannot use that non-free media file. For example, we generally do not allow non-free pictures of living persons, since it is generally possible for someone to take an image of that person and release it as a free license. Just because there is no currently existing free image does not preclude the possibility of creating a new free image.
 * Non-free media should be reduced in size/resolution/quality as much as reasonably possible to still be usable to achieve minimal use. Images generally should be less than 100,000 pixels, and audio files less than 10 seconds, for example.
 * Non-free media may not be used simply to add visual or audio decoration to an article. Such media are expected to be closely associated with the text of the article as to help the reader's understanding of the topic; this includes photos of historical importance to help document famous events, or cover artwork for notable albums, films, and other works in describing that work on its own article.
 * Non-free media use requires a "non-free rationale" on the media's File: page. This rationale includes documentation to demonstrate both the reasoning for each use of that media file, and to better support the fair use justification including identification of the source, the existing license, and ownership of the copyright on the work.

More explanatory discussion of how the non-free content policy is implemented can be found at WP:NFC.