Are images GFDL'd?

Hello. I think I have seen in the past that images used on Wikipedia are not 
under GFDL. That is one of the things I have never taken too seriously, but 
may be I should have. So now I am trying. And I apologize if my points are 
already raised and discussed in the past. In that case, I hope someone could 
point me the past discussion(s) that I can read and use to inform my fellow 
wikipedians at ja.

If images are not under GFDL, and say, simply copyrighted by the person who 
uploaded, then I think there is a fair chance that downloading an image from 
an wikipedia and uploading to another wikipedia would constitute a copyright 
violation. I now quite a few people have done that at Japanese wikipedia, 
and I would definitely want to notify them to be careful.

(The exception I can think is that the whole wikipedia in multiple languages 
is a single work...but I think nobody so far suggested or argued that it is 
the case.)

I guess there is a page like [[Wikipedia:Image Usage Policy]] or something 
similar in each wikipedia.

And it states that the person who upload an image has to be the copyright 
holder, a GFDL permission from the copyright holder, or the image has to be 
in public domain.

I am inclined to say that all the people who uploaded the images they 
created did indeed agree that images will be released under GFDL. But the 
literal interpretation seems to allow some alternative take, like, "I am the 
copyright holder as this policy requires. And I am not asked to release my 
image under GFDL here, as far as I can understand from this policy. So I 
assume this image will not be used as a GFDL image."

Of course, when we see image information page, there might be an explicit 
statement that the image is released under GFDL. That's good. But when such 
a notice is absent, should we be careful not to use those images as GFDL'd?

As always, thank you for your attention.

regards,

Tomos

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