On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 11:32:30 -0500, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Well that was the issue that I brought up, existing articles where a substantial amount of copyvio text is added.
Consider an entirely new section, all copyvio. I think it's unlikely that additions, even fairly substantial ones in that section could be considered anything but derived works.
The *section* itself would be a derived work. But would the *changes*? If that's the case, copyright law is more stupid than I thought. If I take a copyrighted work and add my own ending to it, does that mean that later I cannot use that ending on an independent work?
It becomes difficult to judge which edits are derived works, ultimately you can't tell without a court opinion ... and since we'd rather not go there, I contend that the only sure course of action would be destroy all updates to an article past the point in time a copyvio was added.
Some cases are difficult; some are not. No need to throw away all.
Andre Engels