Ops, sorry, I realize that this was not posted to the list. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alex R." alex756@nyc.rr.com To: "Fred Bauder" fredbaud@ctelco.net Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 10:51 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikilists and GDFL
----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Bauder" fredbaud@ctelco.net To: "Alex T." alex756@nyc.rr.com; "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2003 8:36 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikilists and GDFL
Who decides if they were fair use? Do we have a US Federal District Court judge who can render binding fair use opinions? Do we have someone who can even say what is a copyright violation? It is all
opinion.
Well, observance of law is a duty of citizens, most of whom have limited access to legal expertise. However being regularly engaged in a
regulated
activity as our editors are, results in gradual development of expertise which is "good enough" for our purposes.
This is exactly my point about collaboarative process. It gradually
develops
into something more cogent, so why would anyone want to use some old out of date version of a page?
Even if one of regular contributors was a US Federal District Court
judge
and they chose to share their expertise with us it would not serve as
that
would be the opinion of only one judge in one jurisdiction in a
complicated
field with diverse authority.
You are now misquoting me. I did not state that Wikipedia needed a US Federal judge to be give his opinion but render a legally binding decision on copyright law. Also you do not seem to know the basics of copyright law and fair use. It is an American concept and all of Wikipedia is published in the United States, so even French pages on the French Wikipedia written by French contributors is under US copyright law. It is all published in the good ol'USA. That's a fact.
What we have to do is in good faith do our best.
And my point is that good faith applies to our collaboration on articles and the use of those articles and the contribution of others.
These and discussions on talk pages are a vital part of our
self-education
and our program for compliance.
It is of course, opinion, but we need to form opinions which are
sufficient
for our purposes, which are to appropriatly apply fair use and avoid infringement and possible litigation.
So on one had you think we need to work together, but only when dealing with legal issues, not when dealing with content. This seems
contradictiory
to me. You want to gain the benefit of collaboration only when it suits you, otherwise you want to discard collaboration when it doesn't.
This does not bode well for the future of some formal structure that you are suggesting that "we" are part of. the whole point of being in an organization is that you surrender your personal point of view to the collective whole so that the whole can function. If everyone wants to allow people to use old versions of pages, that does not seems to support the idea of the Wikipedia being more than just a rough compendium of randomly pooror incomplete pages.
Alex756