Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>With text it's even worse because our public editing process make it
>much easier for someone to prove that our text was a derived work,
>where in a more traditional medium a sufficient amount of refactoring
>would usually manage to hide the violation.
>
>With images I plan on just replacing all the ones with suspect
>copyright (i.e. everything that isn't CC* or GFDL and uploaded by the
>author, or with an actual letter attached that explicitly says PD or
>an acceptable license) over time... but I have no idea how to solve
>text.
>
>
Indeed, I'm rather surprised at the glib and easy way with which some
people suggest "refactoring" copyright violations rather than deleting
them when possible. Under normal circumstances, every revision of an
article is a derivative work of previous revisions going back to the
beginning. Simply rephrasing to avoid identical strings of words is not
sufficient to avoid this.
To be confident that you don't have a derivative work, you would need to
remove all content traceable to the copyright infringement, in much the
same way that some editors rewrite an article entirely from scratch if
they find it unsatisfactory. Using the infringing content as a base to
work from is risky at best. When we need to preserve history that
predates the violation, I can understand the dilemma that forces us to
bury these problems instead of excising them, but otherwise it's a
shoddy practice. Images are rather different, because the revisions can
be entirely different, merely taking advantage of the same filename, and
all traces of a copyright violation are easier to remove.
Exactly what qualifies as a derivative work is not always clear, and as
best I'm aware there is effectively an open conflict on the issue
between the rulings of two circuits of the U.S. Court of Appeals. So
better guidance would only be available with a Supreme Court decision. I
rather suspect that under the right circumstances, a Wikipedia article
might provide them with an excellent set of facts on which to issue such
a ruling. However, the expense and distraction of litigation being what
it is, I'm not saying that setting legal precedent this way is something
we should aspire to. Also, once faced directly with the prospect of an
unfavorable outcome, people often discover that they're actually _more_
comfortable with uncertainty.
--Michael Snow