On Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 11:17 PM, Scott MacDonald doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
The joke is now on me as people actually want to pull the TFA because of a perception that I violated the NPG's copyright. To say I'm pissed off it to put it mildly.
Did your username change confuse matters? From what I can see, it did. I'm glad Woody tracked down the edit where most of the text was written. The ironic thing is, that if subsequent edits change the current wording of the lead, the only places the full form of the disputed text may exist will be in the old page versions and on the NPG website. I'm sure the following cycle has taken place many times:
1) Wikipedia editor C writes text XYZ in Wikipedia article F 2) Other website (E) copies text XYZ without attribution 3) Wikipedia editor D rewrites the Wikipedia text in the form ABC
[This can happen either due to a desire to rewrite the text in a better form, or due to a desire to avoid what they wrongly think is a copyvio, either way, the result can be utter confusion]
4) No-one realises that the XYZ text on Website E is now a copy of something in the page history of article F.
What should happen here and what implications does it have for copyright situations? Can you claim copyright on a piece of text buried deep in page history, many months or years ago, that has since been extensively rewritten? Does the amount of time it was visible and published in the Wikipedia article matter (this can range from seconds to years)? Can website E legitimately claim copyright on the text if they are the only ones publishing it and the Wikipedia article currently says something different?
I think I know the answers to these questions, but am not sure, so want to see what others think.
Carcharoth
On 21 March 2011 10:11, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
What should happen here and what implications does it have for copyright situations? Can you claim copyright on a piece of text buried deep in page history, many months or years ago, that has since been extensively rewritten? Does the amount of time it was visible and published in the Wikipedia article matter (this can range from seconds to years)? Can website E legitimately claim copyright on the text if they are the only ones publishing it and the Wikipedia article currently says something different?
I think I know the answers to these questions, but am not sure, so want to see what others think.
Copyright exists as soon as something is published in a fixed form. Which includes any given wikipedia edit. Subsequent edits have no impact on this.
On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 10:22 AM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 21 March 2011 10:11, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
What should happen here and what implications does it have for copyright situations? Can you claim copyright on a piece of text buried deep in page history, many months or years ago, that has since been extensively rewritten? Does the amount of time it was visible and published in the Wikipedia article matter (this can range from seconds to years)? Can website E legitimately claim copyright on the text if they are the only ones publishing it and the Wikipedia article currently says something different?
I think I know the answers to these questions, but am not sure, so want to see what others think.
Copyright exists as soon as something is published in a fixed form. Which includes any given wikipedia edit. Subsequent edits have no impact on this.
An analogy in printed works would be if all copies of a book were burned or no longer existed, but an existing work had copied that work without attribution. In terms of online works, I'm really not sure how it works. If a website was publishing at one point in the past, and is no longer there now, how do you prove the work was ever published? I'm not sure using the WayBack machine would really work as a way of proving that a website was at one point publishing something, but I'm sure this has been considered before.
In Wikipedia terms, imagine that all the old page versions vanished, and all you had was the current version and no page history. This is what a printed version of Wikipedia would be like. This is, admittedly, not likely to happen (all the old page versions becoming inaccessible). But what about deleted revisions of a page? Especially those page revisions deleted because of unrelated copyvio issues that meant the page revision had to be deleted, even if some of it didn't infringe copyright?
The sequence there goes:
1) Unrelated copyvio inserted 2) Text ABC created by Wikipedia editor 3) Text ABC copied by external wesite without attribution 4) Text ABC altered to text XYZ by another Wikipedia editor 5) Unrelated copyvio reverted and page revisions 1 2 and 4 deleted
In that sort of situation, how do you prove that text ABC was originally written on Wikipedia? Remember that deleted revisions are subject to being deleted at any time. However, I think that copyvio revision deletions should be kept in perpetuity because the way revision deletion currently works, a lot of genuine non-copyright violating revisions made before the copyvio is spotted, get thrown out as well.
Carcharoth
On 21 March 2011 10:11, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
What should happen here and what implications does it have for copyright situations? Can you claim copyright on a piece of text buried deep in page history, many months or years ago, that has since been extensively rewritten? Does the amount of time it was visible and published in the Wikipedia article matter (this can range from seconds to years)? Can website E legitimately claim copyright on the text if they are the only ones publishing it and the Wikipedia article currently says something different? I think I know the answers to these questions, but am not sure, so want to see what others think.
I think the real answer is "we'll see if we have the terrible misfortune to have it hit court".
The fine details of law like this are not resolved until someone brings a case. The opposing lawyers then attempt to pull the resolution of the quantum uncertainty in a direction that suits their client. Case law ensues. Positing a world where laws are resolved as people think they *should* be, as worked out by a long chain of non-lawyer logical postulates and syllogisms, does not match how the world works. The correct answer right now is "nobody knows."
- d.