[0] is the addition of an abstract from the journal Nature [1]. It was in the encyclopedia for four months until I accidentally found it. I was told in IRC that the procedure for this situation is to simply remove the change from the current revision of the article, because it is technically difficult to permanently remove things from the database. This seems incredibly problematic to me. From a legal perspective, I don't see any difference in viewing an old version of an article which contains a copyright violation, and that copyright violation still being in the current version. There is some effort to hide old revisions from search engines, but the violation still exists on the Internet, and the copyright owner's rights are still being violated.
Please note that I have no special interest in this text. I thought it was common sense that blatant violations like this would be deleted from the database, and so am very surprised at the lackadaisical attitude I have encountered. This seems like a tremendous legal risk, and there must be some technical solution for easily removing old revisions from the database, especially in cases like this where the text remained essentially unchanged.
After I asked for more information about the procedure for deleting text like this from the database, I was told to nominate the article for deletion so that it could be rewritten without the copyright violation. The community solution was to remove the text from the current revision and speedy keep the article. This does nothing to protect the rights of the journal Nature, and if the community is going to be left in charge of handling copyright violations, they should be empowered with tools for permanently removing that text.
I hope someone here can tell me about all the aspects of this situation of which I am unaware in addition to the actual legal perspective.
/Brian Mingus User:Alterego
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Deep_brain_stimulation&diff=pr... [1] http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/1301408a.html;jsessionid...
On 8/12/07, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
Please note that I have no special interest in this text. I thought it was common sense that blatant violations like this would be deleted from the database, and so am very surprised at the lackadaisical attitude I have encountered.
It is possible to delete back to a version that existed before the text was added.
This seems like a tremendous legal risk,
DMCA safe harbour.
and there must be some technical solution for easily removing old revisions from the database, especially in cases like this where the text remained essentially unchanged.
It is posible but not easy on articles with large revision histories. Deep brain stimulation has a little over 250 so it would be doable.
Brian wrote:
[0] is the addition of an abstract from the journal Nature [1]. It was in the encyclopedia for four months until I accidentally found it. I was told in IRC that the procedure for this situation is to simply remove the change from the current revision of the article, because it is technically difficult to permanently remove things from the database. This seems incredibly problematic to me. From a legal perspective, I don't see any difference in viewing an old version of an article which contains a copyright violation, and that copyright violation still being in the current version. There is some effort to hide old revisions from search engines, but the violation still exists on the Internet, and the copyright owner's rights are still being violated.
Please note that I have no special interest in this text. I thought it was common sense that blatant violations like this would be deleted from the database, and so am very surprised at the lackadaisical attitude I have encountered. This seems like a tremendous legal risk, and there must be some technical solution for easily removing old revisions from the database, especially in cases like this where the text remained essentially unchanged.
After I asked for more information about the procedure for deleting text like this from the database, I was told to nominate the article for deletion so that it could be rewritten without the copyright violation. The community solution was to remove the text from the current revision and speedy keep the article. This does nothing to protect the rights of the journal Nature, and if the community is going to be left in charge of handling copyright violations, they should be empowered with tools for permanently removing that text.
I hope someone here can tell me about all the aspects of this situation of which I am unaware in addition to the actual legal perspective.
/Brian Mingus User:Alterego
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Deep_brain_stimulation&diff=pr... [1] http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/1301408a.html;jsessionid...
You're making a mountain out of a molehill. The journal in question is not "Nature", it's "Neuropsychopharmacology" though that does not change the points at issue from either side. Saying that the violation is blatant is pure hyperbole. So is the phrase, "tremendous legal risk".
I would fault the editors for not putting the material in quotation marks, but that's an easy fix. As long as the material is properly credited this wouldn't be a copyright violation at all. It is from an abstract in a scientific journal. The purpose of abstracts includes letting people know about these studies; it is to their benefit to have others quoting the abstract. Has there ever been any case brought to court over the use of an abstract? This is exactly the kind of material If all else fails this is exactly the sort of thing that justifies applying the fair use rules.
Ec
Brian wrote:
[0] is the addition of an abstract from the journal Nature [1]. It was in the encyclopedia for four months until I accidentally found it. I was told in IRC that the procedure for this situation is to simply remove the change from the current revision of the article, because it is technically difficult to permanently remove things from the database. This seems incredibly problematic to me. From a legal perspective, I don't see any difference in viewing an old version of an article which contains a copyright violation, and that copyright violation still being in the current version. There is some effort to hide old revisions from search engines, but the violation still exists on the Internet, and the copyright owner's rights are still being violated.
I'm always surprised at the very lax attitude that en.wikipedia has towards copyright violations. On it.wikipedia we have a much more draconian approach: if a potential copyright violation is present (usually at least a sentence copied from another website) all the versions in the history containing that bit are deleted, and, if there are good edits in between, a note is put in the talk page with the deleted revisions. This is sometimes an awful work for the sysop that has to do it, since sometimes pages where a copyvio had been removed get edited with another copyvio - the risk is that previously deleted versions may get recovered by mistake as the only procedure to remove a version is deleting the page and recovering the good versions. So, for heavily edited pages, from time to time we move the old versions to another name which we protect, so that the history is not too long (we did it for the village pump a couple of times, than we switched to having a page for each thread that gets included in the weekly pump). We also have a bot (RevertBot) which checks all the edits with google and yahoo and creates a page of suspect copyvios that a sysop will have to check manually who copied from whom. Occasionally we discovered copyvios on en.wikipedia that had been there for more than one year. We also had a case of a trusted user with 30k edits, who had been sysop in the past, that was caught copying large chunks of text from printed encyclopedias. That forced us to set up a project to selectively remove all his non-typos edits as suspected copyvios, which destroyed also quite a bit of work by honest users, who had fixed his edits, added stuff that alone didn't make sense to keep but was precious anyway.
Cruccone
Isn't this simply a job for oversight? While it doesn't completely remove the revisions from the database, it makes them invisible to almost everyone.
On 13/08/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Isn't this simply a job for oversight? While it doesn't completely remove the revisions from the database, it makes them invisible to almost everyone.
Oh God no. Simple deletion of copyrighted material is general practice and completely sufficient for most purposes; it moves it from being "public" to "internal", the conceptual equivalent of MegaEncyclopediaCorp having a photocopy of it stuffed in a filing cabinet for one of their researchers to go check on later.
Oh God no. Simple deletion of copyrighted material is general practice and completely sufficient for most purposes; it moves it from being "public" to "internal", the conceptual equivalent of MegaEncyclopediaCorp having a photocopy of it stuffed in a filing cabinet for one of their researchers to go check on later.
Ok, that's reasonable. The suggestion is the original email, however, was effectively oversight, which is why I mentioned it.
On 8/13/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Isn't this simply a job for oversight? While it doesn't completely remove the revisions from the database, it makes them invisible to almost everyone.
Basically agreeing with Andrew Gray, the problem with saying this is a job for oversight is that there is way too much work for the very few people with oversight permission.
If the foundation receives an actually DMCA takedown notice (or any notification from the actual copyright holder that eir copyright is being infringed), then maybe it's a job for oversight, as this is a much more rare occurrence.
Oversight was a temporary hack put in place for the really egregious cases, until revision deletion was completed.
On 12/08/07, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
Please note that I have no special interest in this text. I thought it was common sense that blatant violations like this would be deleted from the database, and so am very surprised at the lackadaisical attitude I have encountered. This seems like a tremendous legal risk, and there must be some technical solution for easily removing old revisions from the database, especially in cases like this where the text remained essentially unchanged.
The problem is that such a deletion involves us writing off four months of the history; four months worth of changes and contributions. We *can* do this, but it means:
a) we lose the knowledge of who contributed b) we lose an awful lot of our ability to constructively edit the article
[This assumes we delete everything between the original addition and your removal, not just roll the article right back to the state immediately before the removal and remove any newer revisions]
a) has licensing implications; whilst we can comply with the bare necessities simply by stating "the following people, not credited in the article history, were contributors", we have problems with where to put this (we always say the history list is the contributor list) and it is a bit clunky (as well as being riddled with false positives)
b) is a little more problematic. Basically, we've lost four months of discussion and development; we've lost a big chunk of what we rely on elsewhere as normal tools for our editing process.
Basically, is the small potential harm caused by us continuing to make copyrighted text available (in an obscure archive, where you have to look hard to find it) greater than the beneft we get from not screwing up our systems? Not a clean-cut answer, that one, and understandably quite amenable to "let's leave it for now".
[Note also that if we get a *complaint*, we do actually Do Stuff About It. This is the pre-emptive case]
By the complainant's logic, all of Google's cached pages are blatant copyright violations.
Should Google eliminate all access? No. Are there lawsuits and massive efforts clamoring to get Google to take everything down? No.
Let's avoid copyright paranoia.
On 15/08/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
By the complainant's logic, all of Google's cached pages are blatant copyright violations.
Should Google eliminate all access? No. Are there lawsuits and massive efforts clamoring to get Google to take everything down? No.
Let's avoid copyright paranoia.
I don't know about massive efforts, but Google has had some legal difficulties with things like that. I believe they've always won so far, but there have certainly been complaints.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_convicted_in_case_brought_by_Belgian_pres s
The above link may change your mind about Google's success. IIRC Le Soir temporarily vanished from all Google searches following this incident. The situation now is none of the French language Belgian papers are mirrored by Google news.
We have lots of (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Category:Google#cat) Google goodness over on Wikinews.
Brian.
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Dalton Sent: 15 August 2007 16:58 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Deleting blatant copyright violations from thedatabase
On 15/08/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
By the complainant's logic, all of Google's cached pages are blatant copyright violations.
Should Google eliminate all access? No. Are there lawsuits and massive efforts clamoring to get Google to take everything down? No.
Let's avoid copyright paranoia.
I don't know about massive efforts, but Google has had some legal difficulties with things like that. I believe they've always won so far, but there have certainly been complaints.
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