[Foundation-l] Deleting blatant copyright violations from the database

[Anthony]

On 8/13/07, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> I personally feel that the foundation should be proactive in developing
> technologies that allow potential copyright violations (for example, edits
> that were reverted because someone thought they were copyright violations)
> to be removed from the database.

Deletion by admins of single revisions from article history is a
feature currently being worked on by the tech team.  If you'd like to
speed up the process, code would be helpful.

But this won't resolve situations where a copyright violation stayed
around for a while, through unrelated edits by other users.  In that
case there is a catch-22 in that removing the one copyright violation
causes another, as the users who made those unrelated edits will no
longer be attributed.  Fixing this would require even more code, and
would be pretty complicated.

> It also seems to me that a lot of dangerous
> interpretation of untested law is going on.

Part of the whole point of OCILLA was supposed to reduce the need for
interpretation of untested law.  But at some point you're always going
to have to do it.

In fact, copyright law is so screwed up that you're pretty much forced
to break it all the time.  Did you know that US copyright law requires
you to send a copy of every copyrighted text work to the Library of
Congress?  That's right, every time you create an article on Wikipedia
without sending a copy to the Library of Congress, you break the law.

> This particular instance appears
> to be a blatant violation of rights, and unless you are suggesting that we
> should be the ones who test it in court, why not just go through the steps
> of creating a procedure to remove this and all others like it?
>
> I am still waiting for the fair use analysis of scientific journal
> abstracts.

Me too.  Maybe once this analysis is performed we can determine
whether or not to remove the text.

Anthony