[Foundation-l] Copyright complaints

[Robert Scott Horning]

Kim Bruning wrote:

>On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 10:45:36AM +0100, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>  
>
>>Kim Bruning wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Are there any (hopefully public) statistics/numbers/guesses as to
>>>how many copyright complaints the foundation gets per $time_period?
>>>
>>>If not, is there any guess, rule of thumb, estimate, or ballpark figure
>>>available, or could anyone dare give me a guesstimate?
>>>
>>>read you soon,
>>>	Kim Bruning
>>>
>>>  
>>>      
>>>
>>Hoi,
>>It is not possible to give you a figure that is inclusive of all the 
>>projects. 
>>    
>>
>
>That's fine, en.wikipedia would be sufficient. I'd like some kind of order of magnitude
>of the problem, and if indeed there is one. 
>
>This is important for wikipolitical reasons on en.wikipedia. If I lose, my right
>honerable opposition shall likely successfully endeavour to severely reduce copyright
>checks on the english wikipedia. 
>
>sincerely,
>	Kim Bruning
>  
>
I am curious about this as well.  I'd also like to see a difference between those complaints that have come in from other sources such as:

*e-mail complaints to board members and/or the Foundation "official" e-mail addresses
*Snail mail complaints about copyright infringement
*court-ordered content take downs by subpoena or cease and desist letters
*e-mail complaints to project admins or sysops
*content owner's complaints on project talk pages
*suspected copyright infingement discoveries by editor/contributors on projects

Of all these, I would guess that the editors and participants on most Wikimedia projects do a fairly good job of identifying content that is likely to have originated from someplace other than the project it is posted on.  Certainly it is suspect to review any very large contributions of text, especially when there is 32K of content with only one edit on the page.  Sometimes a textual contribution simply stands out as having come from something other than a traditional Wikimedia editor due to its exceptional polish in grammar or a surprisingly consistant (usually non-neutral) POV.

I've never had a formal complaint addressed to me, but I have seen just one single copyright complaint by the original author or publisher.  Far more often I've seen an author try to contribute previously published content and then try to explain the GFDL to that same author.  In every case I've seen like that, the author was willing to grant GFDL rights when possible.

In all, I would guess that user suspected cases of copyright infingement outnumbers all other types of copyright violation identifications by at least a ratio of 100:1 or more.  I'm curious to see if anybody else on this list has had any similar experiences.

For that, en.wikibooks has on average about 2-3 significant copyright violations per week, sometimes more if a troublesome user is deliberately staying ignorant on the subject.  Scale that about 100x and I think you might be close for Wikipedia, but I'm not as familiar with that project.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning