On the Italian Wikipedia we have an ongoing discussion about relaxing
our policy on suspect copyright violations, making it more similar to
the English Wikipedia one. If someone reads Italian, the page is
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Copyviol:_adottare_l…
At the moment, whenever a copyright violation is found, our policy is to
completely get rid of it, deleting all edits that contain copyvios from
the article's history. One problem is that such a procedure is quite
lengthy since if you want to delete one revision of an article with 500,
you need to delete the article and restore the 499 good ones; if other
revisions had been deleted previously, one has to remember which ones
before deleting the article, otherwise they cannot be easily recognised.
However, notwhitstanding the pain in the ass of this procedure, we've
always done so because we ideally do not want illegal material on the
wiki, and if it is in the history everyone can easily access it. There
are also issues with the legal systems, AFAIK under US law if someone
sues wikipedia for copyvio and the copyvio is taken down, than that's
it, while under Italian law we would still be responsible (at least
that's an argument emerging in the discussion). What is the experience
in other projects? Any good arguments for/against relaxing our policy?
Thanks
Marco (Cruccone)