Hi Larry and others,

# Shouldn't we set up some protocol on Wikipedia whereby this constantly recurring issue can be systematically resolved?

Yes.

There should be a publicly available procedure (in text or linked form) which describes the copyright evalutaion process. So that everyone can at least to some degree evaluate it.

I would propose some kind of programmed scheme: Like:

(1) Is it a work that you wrote yourself ENTIRELY? Yes -> (*) No -> (*) (2) Do you have used any other material in preparing this contribution? Yes -> (*) No -> (*) (3) Do you have cited one or more items from a source not your own? Yes -> (*) No -> (*) (4) Do you have translated material from another language? ... (*) You are a great author. Please submit. ... (*) You have copied all from sources not your own -> this CANNOT be used in wikipedia. police is underway.

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Known problems: (as far as i know)

(*) Citations not too much, please. Should not exceed 10 (?) percent. Copyright allows citations from others, but it should not be a substantial part of a work.

(*) Translations You need permission of the original author. Public domain sources _can_ interfer with later translated work. (If you retranslate something already translated, but (later) translator still has rights thereon. I dont know if somebody is allowed to retranslate if some proper translations exists. But how to determine originality/the difference between two translations??

(*) Public domain resources There is a slightly different definition in some or all countries although effort has been made to make this equal in all countries by the organisations for intellectual property. One thing public domain in one state is not necessarily public domain in another. The same problems is seen in some (later) statements in Project Gutenberg. This in fact says that one is going to assume public domain and in legal is not, instead it is a copyright infringement. BTW What about asking Project Gutenberg staff members. They must have some evaluation procedure already?

(*) Trademarks You cannot use trademarks for your own. Except in an encyclopedian work. AFAIK. wikipedia should have an 'trademarks are the property of their respective owners and are not assumed to be used freely' statement for pages that aren't encyclopedic. (Or a page which lists all known trademarks. Uugh.) BTW 'wikipedia' should be trademarked. If another person does it there is no way to solve it, even so if wikipedia has used it long before such a trademarkiation(?). Could even stop using of domains. .. (c't (German computer paper, www.heise.de/ct has a huge amount of articles on that problem. Crazy world.))

(*) Betriebsgeheimnisse (?)Proprietary Knowledge You cannot publish proprietary knowledge even if you wrote all this on your own. There is a case about publishing D V D secu rity codes by a professor.

(*) Publisher rights Reading some books on that matter there is an equal amount of legal stuff on publisher and publishing rights as is the case with copyright items. People -especially authors- have to make sure that they haven't sold items under some exclusive license to anybody else. Come to GNU!

(*) Misunderstanding of the 'legal availability of some private copies' That is the N music case. Short: Anybode can make a very very small number of private copies. True. BUT must have got a legally copy of the work as long as holding a copy of it(!). Somebody else cannot provide such a service for you because THEY perform a massive duplication of works then. This seems even the case if private persons owning original records want to have a copy of it somewhere in cyberspace. No service is allowed to provide that. Every private person has to process it on their own. N has to pay for it.

(*) Patent claims One (great) publisher writes in all his books, similarly: "For educational services only - not evaluated according to patent issues !" This might has something to do with commercial applications of some items. Until now I dont understand what is the problem here. Maybe somebody prosecutes (?anklagen) you the publisher that you have let him believe something is free to be used and it isnt. Like LZW compression scheme. Think of somebody reading on it, develope a huge software product and finally finds out that it is patented, or even after he has made some money from it.

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This is arbitrarily (?) complex. Anybody who can show up evidence in such an infringement of some rights can stop you publishing it/all rigorously.

-> advice -> make it modular as much as possible. (ever true) -> let lawyers evaluate big sources (like PG encyclopedia) -> reuse project gutenberg evaluations -> lawyers please help us!

Good luck.