Kate Turner wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote in
gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc:
It would appear that we are breaking the law with
respect to copyright
at
download.wikimedia.org.
this is not particular to downloads, but applies to any place that old
revisions are available, including the web interface.
An apparent infringement is not always "breaking the law."
This is a
result of our policy about the insertion of copyrighted
material into articles:
[[Wikipedia:Copyright problems#Instructions]]
"Pages where the most recent edit is a copyright violation, but the
previous article was not, should not be deleted. They should be
reverted. The violating text will remain in the page history for
archival reasons unless the copyright holder asks the Wikimedia
Foundation to remove it."
does this policy apply everywhere or only en.wp?
It seems like a reasonable policy. This is directly concerned with a
core principle so I would suggest that it should be broadly applied.
As a result our
database contains large quantities of violating
material.
my understand of the relevant US law is that we are not required to
aggressively remove copyright violations until requested by the copyright
holder.
Yes and no. Technically one is required to remove material that one
knows to be an infringement when one becomes aware of it by any means.
However, in the absence of a take down order there is the easy defence
of not knowing that the material is an infringement. "Not knowing" is a
broader concept than simply being to identify a certain passage as
identical to that by someone else. If we determine that to be the case
we have an infringement as a question of fact, but not necessarily as a
question of law. If we maintain the offending material in the current
article after it has been fully identified as an infringement the
likelihood that we have also an infringement in law is greater. For
purposes of this line of reason we can safely assume that a claim of
fair use in the current article is not available, but the standards of
fair use may be considerably relaxed.
Access to the infringing material is considerably more limited, even
though in theory anyone can access it. Let's be practical! Who is
going to spend a lot of his time looking through often lengthy article
histories looking for copyvios to plagiarize? If a copyright holder
properly makes a request to take down the material from the archive we
should be prepared to comply, but until that happens we have no need to
be so worried about this stuff.
I agree that copyvio material should be identified, but NOT in the edit
summary. That only makes it easier for someone to go through the edit
histories to find it. A two-step approach may be better. In the first
edit the article is tagged as a copyvio; in a new edit the offending
material along with the tag are removed from the article.
Ec