Ilya Schurov wrote:
Robert Rohde wrote:
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Ilya Schurov ilya.schurov@noo.ru wrote:
<snip> > They say that we put excessive burden on the editors and it is simply > not necessary to investigate facts of copyright violation on third-party > websites (at least, since there are no requests from copyright holders), > because we have no explicit statements of the Foundation that we have to > do it. <snip>
On the narrow issue of en:WP:C and Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry, neither is expected to impose a positive burden on editors. The court case is predicated on the fact that they already knew they were linking to copyright violations and continued to do so intentionally.
The enwiki policy is simply a statement that we will remove links if we become aware that they are associated with copyvios, but it is fine for an ordinarily editor to link to anything unless he has already become aware of a problem. No editor is required or expected to do copyright investigations before adding a normal link.
Yes, it's clear. Nobody is going to require editors to do copyvio investigation of third-party resources before linking them. It's a conflict resolution matter: e.g. one editor claim that some site violates copyright and therefore we shouldn't link there, while the other editor try to put this link into the article and argue that copyright issues are not important here. ArbCom believes that the site under consider indeed violates copyright. Should we consider this as an argument to remove such link, or just ignore it?
OK, let me put my question in the following way:
What is the status of this page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Copyright, which says: "Giving external links to copyright-violating content is prohibited"? Is it a policy every project should follow?
Thanks,