On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 21:55:24 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 10:58:37 -0700, Mark Williamson
<node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
"Or are you happy to contribute copyright
violations as long as they
are 'in the target language'?"
If I were me, I'd ask Angela to apologise if she asked me to apologise.
I think that's a quite reasonable thing to ask. You took a text from a
website, and put it on Wikipedia. In my book that's a copyright
violation. Your argument that it was a government website does not
hold water - US government publications are free of copyright, but
other countries have other rules. In general, it is a bad thing to
take texts from other sites unless they specifically state that they
are not under copyright.
It's not what she asked, it's the way she asked it. Had I said the
same thing in the reverse situation, you would probably be telling me
I should apologise to her.
And how do you know I haven't checked the copyright laws that are
applicable in this case? Also, since another site based in that
country similarly used them without any attribution but attributed all
other works to their respective authors and sometimes gave copyright
and permission notices, I think that, given the multitude of sources
used by that site, it is not unreasonable to trust their judgement
especially when added to the facts: It was published by a governmental
organisation and was not sold but rather distributed freely. Also, if
you take into account the social and political tendencies of the
government in question, there is quite a different conclusion than for
countries which are highly protective of government works. There is no
royalty (one common reason for such measures), there is no
totalitarian regime (another reason), and their economic views would
not generally support such laws.
If you want to tell me that it *is* illegal and show me your sources,
I will be happy to put copyvio notices up myself.
Mark