Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
On 30 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
Having a status flag in the database would be very helpful for forkers, but we should not encourage uploading photos under licenses that limit redistribution. But a little more Linus Torvalds style pragmatism and a little less Richard Stallman style zealotry wouldn't hurt either.
And end up being sued like Linus?
I agree with Erik on this. Simply guessing that something is copyright doesn't make it so. It's all a question of whether you interpret copyright laws liberally in favour of the user or liberally in favour of the putative copyright owner. The fear of being sued is a red herring; we are very far from any possibility that such a thing might happen. With the safe harbor provisions of copyright law we would have ample opportunity to remove offending material before it went that far. Notification of copyright violation would have to come first from the copyright OWNER or his AUTHORIZED representative, not from some disinterested 3rd party do-gooder with unschooled guesses about what the law says.
Effectively violating copyright is very easy to do. I have hundreds of copyright books in my personal library that I could scan with OCR software, and add into a Wikipedia article without anyone EVER realizing it. That wouldn't make it right, but I'm confident that nobody would ever call my hand on it. If I can do it so can any other contributor, so let's not be naive about this.
Of course, if a copyright violation is flagrant and obvious it should be removed. Unfortunately, most alleged violations are not that clear, and we should give the contributor the benefit of the doubt without descending into copyright paranoia.
Eclecticology