Ray Saintonge wrote:
I think I may have edited some articles that *previously* contained copyrighted material, and now I'm wondering if these edits actually need to be deleted, which would be annoying...
I think we should be all right as long as the article history pages are not available to search engines.
In some cases, as you outlined, this could be true. But in others, I don't think so.
If someone were to cut and paste a new Tom Clancy novel into wikipedia, we'd want to get it out completely, even out of the history.
Under the DMCA, an ISP (me) has a certain "safe harbor" immunity if we follow a "take down" procedure. In this example, if Tom Clancy or his representatives sent a formal demand of the correct form, then I would be required to "take down" the material in question. Until then, I don't have to do anything, although we strive for a much higher level of care, due to our interest in having the database be "copyright clean" for potential licensees.
As a practical matter, I'm not very worried about copyright lawsuits. If a copyright holder has a problem with anything we are doing, then we'll gladly comply with their demands instantly to avoid a lawsuit. We aren't copyright protestors in that sense.
--Jimbo