S.Vertigo wrote:
Angela:
The legal risk lies with the user who uploaded it and claimed it was
fair use, not with the Foundation.
That may be the letter of the law interpretation, but for "the foundation" to make a policy of deflecting all such responsibility to its contributors, would only bode well for any competing project that chose to show a little more philosophical and legal backbone. Pioneering projects need to be pioneering, not capitulating or betraying to their own supporters, especially if the mistakes are honest ones in the realm of intel property. In any case, the inclusion of material is a community decision, and so the foundation as a facilitator for the violation, (by an implied community decision) is legally responsible. Does going apenuts with compliance paranoia to a particular legal system comply with the larger goals of being globally accessible and philosophically equitable? I.D.T.S...
What exactly constitutes a "community 'decision'" when anything can be changed anytime, is wobbly.
I too thought that the response was peculiar. Passing the buck onto some naïve individual who may not understand copyright law at all evades responsibility. The argument is even less tenable when we don't even know the legal identity of the contributor.
Collective responsibility and collective courage are the head and tail of the same coin. If you flip that coin and it consistently lands the same way you have a biased coin. Collective responsibility means that we stop people from uploading blatant copyright violations. With collective courage we are able to give the contributor the benefit of the doubt. We give him an opportunity to argue his case in the context of copyright law, and if he makes a convincing case we accept his material with eyes wide open. This does not mean that we won't review our decision if it is seriously challenged by a duly interested party, nor does it mean that we will goo to the wall with the decision Sometimes we need to say, "This material may still be copyright, but it's 30 years old, the publisher went bankrupt 25 years ago, and the writer or photographer died 20 years ago without a family and without mentioning copyrights in his will. Maybe we should take a chance."
Ec