Hello again,
I have a query about copyright, although not directly related to the Bryce Harrington thing. If an article is in breach of copyright, and someone else replaces the text with original material, the copyrighted material is still publically available on the Wikipedia to anyone who knows about the revision history page. Doesn't this mean that there is still a breach of copyright here? And if so, doesn't the entire article (along with its history) have to be deleted, and not just rewritten?
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...
Thanks for clarifying this!
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+
Oliver Pereira wrote:
I have a query about copyright, although not directly related to the Bryce Harrington thing. If an article is in breach of copyright, and someone else replaces the text with original material, the copyrighted material is still publically available on the Wikipedia to anyone who knows about the revision history page. Doesn't this mean that there is still a breach of copyright here? And if so, doesn't the entire article (along with its history) have to be deleted, and not just rewritten?
Ideally, we should drop the specific revisions that are problematic, leaving the rest of the history intact.
--Jimbo
On Mon, 2002-11-25 at 14:59, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
I have a query about copyright, although not directly related to the Bryce Harrington thing. If an article is in breach of copyright, and someone else replaces the text with original material, the copyrighted material is still publically available on the Wikipedia to anyone who knows about the revision history page. Doesn't this mean that there is still a breach of copyright here? And if so, doesn't the entire article (along with its history) have to be deleted, and not just rewritten?
Ideally, we should drop the specific revisions that are problematic, leaving the rest of the history intact.
Actually, I think it's reasonable to state that we're only publishing the latest version of the article. It's similar to the way that Google etc. has archives of the pages they index, which are even publicly viewable to a degree, but a clearly not intended to replace the original document and are not presented as such.
Oliver Pereira wrote:
I have a query about copyright, although not directly related to the Bryce Harrington thing. If an article is in breach of copyright, and someone else replaces the text with original material, the copyrighted material is still publically available on the Wikipedia to anyone who knows about the revision history page. Doesn't this mean that there is still a breach of copyright here? And if so, doesn't the entire article (along with its history) have to be deleted, and not just rewritten?
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. Not even Wikipedia's own search feature can illustrate these old versions. That technique is also worthwhile in that if a search engine continued to produce a randomly selected version from the history page, the value of material on Wikipedia would be considerably less reliable than it is now. As things stand, nothing in the current version of an article suggests that a copyright violation was removed. If we apply the fair use rules to the material we may find that even if something is not fair use on the article, it could become fair use on the history back pages. The first and the fourth factors will notably be different.
1. Putting it on the history page will be transformative in that the intent is no longer a matter of making it easily available to the general public, and it will have acquired a kind of meta-existence of interest only to those who are looking for possible sources of future copyright violations. Having a data base of these incidents will help to identify others in the future.
4. The likelyhood of the copyright holder being damaged by having this material in our archives is very low. At least in theory, the purpose of editing is to create versions that are progressively more reliable than the previous ones. If the user even cares to go through old versions with the aim of inappropriately using material that is copyrighted, he is still faced with the question of whether what he has found is an accurate and reliable quote. That's a daunting task for someone who is looking for a quick fix for his college essay - thus it is highly unlikely that what is found on our history pages will have any kind of impact on the market for the original work.
My comments are written with textual material in mind. We have no need to keep violating pictures.
Eclecticology
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
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