On Tuesday 16 July 2002 15:55, Jimmy Wales wrote:

This strikes me as a good idea, removing them I mean.

On Saturday, when Lee and I do the move to the new machine, we will re-copy the image directories completely. So don't worry about what's on beta. Everything on beta will go away early Saturday morning.

By "still on beta" I meant, of course, that if I had been wrong to delete the file, there's a backup copy.

phma

At 11:40 PM 7/16/02 +0200, you wrote:

On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Pierre Abbat wrote:

...

She was asked to stop uploading them if she couldn't prove that they are public domain, and she apparently has left.

Without knowing the details, this sounds to me like the surest way to make people give up and leave the project. For a volunteer who invests a lot of energy in making a contribution, it is very easy to lose all that energy.

Please consider this when you think people make mistakes in their voluntary contributions. It is much more useful to inform them about ways they can improve their contribution, than telling them to stop doing what they are doing. Open new doors instead of closing doors in their face.

If I recall correctly, she was asked where she'd gotten them, and did she have permission to use them. If she did, well, it's less effort to type "I drew these myself" or "they're from a Sears catalog from 1902" than to upload all that stuff in the first place.

If a copyright owner would complain (did this ever happen?), only Jimmy is at risk, so the rest of us really don't have to play police. No, I'm not suggesting that we should pirate copy contents to the Wikipedia. We should follow all the rules and laws that there are. But don't play police if you aren't one. And if you are, don't use excessive violence. Volunteer souls are fragile and cannot take much beating.

You mean like the way you've just lectured everyone without actually knowing what we said or did? :-)

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Lars Aronsson wrote:

...

If a copyright owner would complain (did this ever happen?), only Jimmy is at risk,

In one sense, this is true. But in another sense the project is at risk.

Realistically speaking, the odds of anyone trying to make a big deal out of anything that we are doing is very remote. From a legal standpoint, as an ISP, I'm only required to "takedown" material put up by users upon a formal complaint from a copyright holder. Of course I would do that in a heartbeat -- we're not here to fight the Napster fight, that's for sure!

But other than direct legal action, there are other serious risks of taking too lax an attitude about copyright violations. We purport to relicense the content under the GNU FDL. Without some reasonable assurances that our content is legitimately unencumbered, it will be difficult for others to take our content and redistribute it in other media.

Nonetheless, I most certainly echo Lars' sentiment that being gentle to newcomers is important to the wiki way. We're a community of love and co-operation, not controversy and fighting.

--Jimbo

I clearly side with Lars and Jimmy on this one. Copyright law, with so many big corporations and institutions trying to protect their turf has become something that goes beyond understanding unless you have specialized legal training. The only ones that can afford that are those same big corporations and institutions that are also able to apply economies of scale. If more than one country is involved the situation is even worse.

We also encounter sites on the net where the site owner has made a dubious claim. The Republican claim to copyright for the 1911 encyclopaedia is a case in point. (The pop-up that I get every time asking to join the Republican anti-terrorism campaign at least suggests that they have a big hand in it.) Just because someone says that something is copyright, doesn't mean that is.

Just yesterday I was looking at a site put up by the University of Illinois that included a series of drawings for identifying insects; the pages included a copyright statement. The site in turn credited the drawings to an unnamed project that was carried on with WPA sponsorship. That means the project and the drawings date to the 1930's - obviously after 1923. Then I ask myself were WPA projects covered by policies for U.S. government publications?. If not, who really did make the drawings? WPA projects were Roosevelt's make work projects for escaping the depression, so that the participants were likely not thinking about copyright. If the participants did have the copyright, did they renew them after 28 years? How were the rights transferred to the U of I? The questions keep coming, and trying to answer each can be a major project in itself.

We had another situation recently where a member wanted to upload Sudanese music representative of the different regions of that country. The comment was quite rightly made that there are performance rights on top of composition rights. Were the performances made in Sudan? What is Sudan's copyright law? No country is obliged to recognize intellectual property rights greater than those granted in a person's home country.

My approach to copyright is to first use common sense, make reasonable inquiries, and give the benefit of the doubt to including the material while recognizing the author's moral right to be given credit for his work no matter how old it is. The "better safe than sorry" approach that avoids all risk, is a recipe for accomplishing nothing. Once due diligence has been applied, a policy of "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission" makes good sense. Willingness of the ISP to take down offending material on receipt of proper notice will protect him legally. A reputation for reasonable (rather than absolute) diligence should satisfy our users about the copyright safety of the material.

Checking a box to say that one has the right to upload an image can only be done to the best of one's knowledge. I suspect, in the particular case of Jennifer, that she was incautious and probably naïve to the ways of copyright. That likely describes many newbies, especially young ones.

Eclecticology

The only authority is your individual conscience. This is your community.

Are we wikipedians citizens or policemen? Are sysops policemen? If I suspect that another user is breaking the law, should I report that to you or should I take action against the abuser? Speaking for myself, I have no interest whatsoever to play the role of a police.

Maybe wikipedians are both, maybe wikipedians are neither. I suspect that the analogy is a bit too stretched for us to communicate well using it.

What I'd say is that if you see someone violating copyrights, and you feel like doing something about it, then do so, and I will support you. If you don't feel like doing something about it, then don't, and I'll support that, too. It's your right to let it go on.

My wish and hope, though, is that we all do a little bit of the "dirty work". It's hard to tell an eager newcomer not to upload copyrighted materials. It's hard to do it in a way that's nice. So anyone who doesn't feel up to it, can feel free to do something else instead.

When I was new to Wikipedia, I remember it was very hard to understand who was in charge, giving orders, and who was just giving their personal opinion. If somebody tells me I "shouldn't" do this or that, I like to know the authority of that statement.

Sure. The interesting thing about Wikipedia, though, is that there's very little "in charge" and there's very little "giving orders". No one has much power over others.

HOWEVER, having said that, we are here together with an agreed upon vision: to write an encyclopedia for the widest possible distribution. This vision gives us a shared context, and some "rules" follow directly from that.

--Jimbo