Toby Bartels wrote:

Eclecticology wrote in part:

...

I don't see where we have had problems with the copyright holders themselves. It would be easy to agree to remove this material if the request came from the copyright holder himself. The pressure so far seems to be coming from people who imagine that something is copyright.

My inclination would be to use borderline material, with an appropriate warning that we will happily remove on request from a properly identified owner.

This is a big difference between images and text. Our text is not only distributed -- it's modified in many ways. A copyright problem there can infect many articles later on. With images, we don't have nearly this sort of practical problem.

But we still need to clearly separate out the non-free images to aid later distributors, try not to rely on them for content, and replace them with free images when possible.

I agree that there is this distinction which in some ways can make the images easier to deal with because they are not (at least to some of us) easier to modify.

With text, you can also have the situation where the text is so modified that its original copyright loses its identity, and the violation may no longer be recognizable. Every single edit or modification creates a new derivative work. There is no single practical criterion for determining when a changed work is no longer representative of the original violation.

I was really railing about the busybodies who believe that something is copyright, and use that as en excuse to rescue Wikipedia. In reality most violations of copyright are not that clear cut.

I've raised the idea of coding boxes before in the contexts of indexing, and flagging possible offensive articles. Possible copyright violation could be just another flag. It should be easy to pull out the flagged articles, whether for purposes of publication, or just because a Wikipedian is looking for articles to clean up.

Ec