Michael Snow wrote:
Well, you've had disagreements with at least two so far. Though of course, lawyers frequently disagree with each other, too. It's sort of an occupational requirement.
Actually I agreed with and helped to defend most of Alex's positions - including most of his views on using fair use materials in Wikipedia. Our only major disagreement was the last one (which turned out to be a misunderstanding on my part - I have sent two emails apologizing to him but have not heard from him yet...).
However, if you feel that our disclaimer of warranties shifts the obligation to downstream users, making it their job to determine what they can legally copy, that's a reasonable position to take.
That is one of the major reasons why I supported Alex in getting the disclaimer linked from every page.
As I have pointed out in some of my other posts, there are other legal justifications for quotation besides fair use under US copyright law. I believe we should shift our reliance to Article 10 of the Berne Convention, which specifically allows quotation of published works.
That seems like a good idea, given our international bent. I find the wording in the Berne Convention to be easier to follow than the convoluted mess of fair use doctrine.
We would have to make sure we mention the source and the name of the author.
Exactly! We have WAY too many images that don't have this type of information. IMO, we should stop all uploads and launch a tagging effort. Once that is fully underway a form should be added to the upload page that would force uploaders to enter text into author, source, and license fields. I consider the current situation to be untenable and dangerous to the long term viability to the project.
To even have a chance of being considered fair, the use *must* give author info, no? I hear that over 20% of the images on the English Wikipedia do not give that information.
I think this can pretty much resolve the issue for text, and an argument can be made to apply it to images and sounds as well.
Yep. That is my IANAL interpretation. Has this been tested for non-text content?
-- mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
Exactly! We have WAY too many images that don't have this type of information. IMO, we should stop all uploads and launch a tagging effort. Once that is fully underway a form should be added to the upload page that would force uploaders to enter text into author, source, and license fields. I consider the current situation to be untenable and dangerous to the long term viability to the project.
My early observations at Wikisource is that most contributors haven't got a clue or a care about copyright. Whatever position we may take in this family of threads, by being here we have given the matter some attention. At Wikisource we are dealing with whole texts, so fair use will usually not be relevant.
Much of the contributed material seems very much in the public domain, and is probably perfectly acceptable, but it would be nice if people would provide enough information to enable the copyright to be verified. Translations are a bigger problem. The works of Plato are well into the public domain, but people tend to ignore that last year's new translation is very much copyright.
I don't like doing other people's homework, especially not for anonymous users to who I can't send a polite query. I like even less having to play the heavy when no substantiation comes up.
Ec
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