I don't believe we're referring to existing articles to which copyrighted text is added, but rather articles that were 100% copyvio but which are edited and thus become "derived works".
Mark
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:34:18 +0100, Jean-Baptiste Soufron jbsoufron@free.fr wrote:
I agree with you but not for the same reasons.
Inserting a copyrighted text in an article is not creating a derivative work from the insterted text, but a derivative work from the original article.
The use of the copyrighted text is prohibited, that's for sure.
But the article is not a derivative work of this copyrighted text. It is a derivative work of the original article, including a copyrighted work without proper authorization. This derivative work is not forbidden because it derivates of a copyrighted text, but because it is a derivative work including a copyrighted text. Then, removing this part should be far enough.
I will provide some jurisprudence about this when I can.
I disagree with this. Do you really intend to allow that if you add something to an article that has later found to have a bit of text that is copyrighted, your text should be removed because it 'could be derived from the copyrighted work'? But what then with using a source? That 'could be derived' too. Wikipedia is very pro-active when there are copyright violations, and I think rightfully so. But to delete non-violating pieces of texts because they appear in one article with violating pieces is a level of destruction that even as a rather strong deletionist I find abhorrent.
Now, if I were to *change* a paragraph that later appeared to be a copyright violation, that's another issue. But adding something separate or changing another part of the article are changes I don't think should be undone. We might as well rollback the whole Wikipedia (what if we consider Wikipedia as a single work, then it is derived too, right?)
Andre Engels
On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:25:23 -0500, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I am concerned that the current handling of copyright problems on wikipedia may be insufficient. As it stands, after detection the offending text is completely removed.
Unfortunately, if there has been a long time span since the insertion of the infringing text there may have been a substantial number of valuable contributions to the article. With the way that most content grows organically over time, it may be very difficult to say if the new text would have been created without the infringing text with any certainty.
In the United States the recent tendency in court appears to be to favor the most expansive definition of a derived work possible. Because of this, I suspect that it would be likely that at least some of the contributions made to an article after the insertion of infringing text would be found by a US court to be derived, thus placing their ownership in question. This interpretation of derived isn't necessitated by current international treaty, and would likely be different (and possibly more sane) in other locations, but I suspect that US legality is a substantial concern.
Determining if a piece of text is derived from another, at least in the over broad sense favored by US courts, is an intractable problem, but the policy could do a better job of avoiding these concerns. Reverting to the point where a substantial amount of infringing text was added, and deleting *all* modifications after that point would be much more certain to avoid impinging on the intellectual property rights of others.
The cost of destroyed improvements might be mitigated by the benefit of creating a greater incentive for frequently contributors to quickly catch and remove violating text.
Of course, none of this is legal advice... _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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