[Wikipedia-l] no need to remove the article nor the chapter

[Jean-Baptiste Soufron]

When the claim is that the original article was violating some 
copyright, then the complete derivative work should be deleted. But...

But "taking some inspiration from" is not violating a copyright. It is 
perfectly admissible to get inspiration from some writings, use it to 
write an original article. There would be no copyright violation in the 
first place. That's a first point.

But when the writing of the original article would be far too similar 
with some other text and that theo riginal copyright violation would be 
impossible to deny, a second point could be to re-write the article. To 
put it simply : there is no need to delete the article, but it is 
necessary to write it once again, only taking inspiration from the 
original text, and then to add the modifications to follow. That's a 
good way to "clean" the copyright on this article. Just writing it from 
scractch once more. It can be long under some circumnstances, but it 
will never be that difficult.

Then you have two lines of defense : first, to claim that there were no 
copyright violation in the first place; then to rewrite the article by 
making it clear that it is now only taking inspiration from the 
original text and nothing else.

Questions ?

Jean-Baptiste Soufron
Intellectual Property and Contracts

Le 20 mars 05, à 01:40, Mark Williamson a écrit :

> I don't believe we're referring to existing articles to which
> copyrighted text is added, but rather articles that were 100% copyvio
> but which are edited and thus become "derived works".
>
> Mark
>
> On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:34:18 +0100, Jean-Baptiste Soufron
> <jbsoufron at free.fr> wrote:
>> I agree with you but not for the same reasons.
>>
>> Inserting a copyrighted text in an article is not creating a 
>> derivative
>> work from the insterted text, but a derivative work from the original
>> article.
>>
>> The use of the copyrighted text is prohibited, that's for sure.
>>
>> But the article is not a derivative work of this copyrighted text. It
>> is a derivative work of the original article, including a copyrighted
>> work without proper authorization. This derivative work is not
>> forbidden because it derivates of a copyrighted text, but because it 
>> is
>> a derivative work including a copyrighted text.
>> Then, removing this part should be far enough.
>>
>> I will provide some jurisprudence about this when I can.
>>
>>> I disagree with this. Do you really intend to allow that if you add
>>> something to an article that has later found to have a bit of text
>>> that is copyrighted, your text should be removed because it 'could be
>>> derived from the copyrighted work'? But what then with using a 
>>> source?
>>> That 'could be derived' too. Wikipedia is very pro-active when there
>>> are copyright violations, and I think rightfully so. But to delete
>>> non-violating pieces of texts because they appear in one article with
>>> violating pieces is a level of destruction that even as a rather
>>> strong deletionist I find abhorrent.
>>
>>>
>>> Now, if I were to *change* a paragraph that later appeared to be a
>>> copyright violation, that's another issue. But adding something
>>> separate or changing another part of the article are changes I don't
>>> think should be undone. We might as well rollback the whole Wikipedia
>>> (what if we consider Wikipedia as a single work, then it is derived
>>> too, right?)
>>>
>>> Andre Engels
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:25:23 -0500, Gregory Maxwell
>>> <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I am concerned that the current handling of copyright problems on
>>>> wikipedia may be insufficient.  As it stands, after detection the
>>>> offending text is completely removed.
>>>>
>>>> Unfortunately, if there has been a long time span since the 
>>>> insertion
>>>> of the infringing text there may have been a substantial number of
>>>> valuable contributions to the article. With the way that  most 
>>>> content
>>>> grows organically over time, it may be very difficult to say if the
>>>> new text would have been created without the infringing text with 
>>>> any
>>>> certainty.
>>>>
>>>> In the United States the recent tendency in court appears to be to
>>>> favor the most expansive definition of a derived work possible.
>>>> Because of this, I suspect that it would be likely that at least 
>>>> some
>>>> of the contributions made to an article after the insertion of
>>>> infringing text would be found by a US court to be derived, thus
>>>> placing their ownership in question.  This interpretation of derived
>>>> isn't necessitated by current international treaty, and would likely
>>>> be different (and possibly more sane) in other locations, but I
>>>> suspect that US legality is a substantial concern.
>>>>
>>>> Determining if a piece of text is derived from another, at least in
>>>> the over broad sense favored by US courts, is an intractable 
>>>> problem,
>>>> but the policy could do a better job of avoiding these concerns.
>>>> Reverting to the point where a substantial amount of infringing text
>>>> was added, and deleting *all* modifications after that point would 
>>>> be
>>>> much more certain to avoid impinging on the intellectual property
>>>> rights of others.
>>>>
>>>> The cost of destroyed improvements might be mitigated by the benefit
>>>> of creating a greater incentive for frequently contributors to 
>>>> quickly
>>>> catch and remove violating text.
>>>>
>>>> Of course, none of this is legal advice...
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