Christiaan Briggs wrote:
Judging from all the conflicting information on the net, a lot of it from reputable sources, it seems anything but clear. I've yet to see one person cite a conclusive source in regard to law.
There is the argument that anything published is copyrighted unless stated otherwise, however it is possible that the very word "release" could be construed as such a statement. Who knows? I don't. And nobody I've discussed this with on Wikimedia, so far, seems to know either.
You have been given a direct clear answer, but you don't seem to like it.
Under the law, "Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangle form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device." http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#what
Someone calling something a "press release" DOES NOT qualify as a license which is compatible with the GNU FDL. I do not know of any court cases arising out of this, and it is easy to understand why there wouldn't be any: companies love it when people just post their PR, and have no reason to sue or complain over it. Even in our case, where we would be modifying heavily, a case would be unlikely to arise, due mostly to our NPOV policy.
If the status of press releases proves to be inconclusive
The status of press releases is *not* inconclusive. It is *conclusive*.
The idea that news readers should be sheltered from press releases by groups of people with superior powers of deduction is elitist (can the masses be allowed to decipher the world for themselves?)
This is a straw man argument. I do not think that "news readers should be sheltered from press releases". On the other hand, of course I am very elitist, so if this was meant to be an argument to persaude me, it fails on those grounds. :-)
Of course this is all beside the point if there are copyright issues. :)
O.k., well, there are.
If you can approach the major press release bureaus and persuade them to release all their work, or some portion of it, under a free license, or if you can secure a direct release from individual companies who would like to do the same, then by all means we can surely publish these on wikisource.
--Jimbo