[Foundation-l] A proposal of partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Archive

[wiki-list at phizz.demon.co.uk]

Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> 
> I wanted to suggest this for a long time. I see two more reasons for this:
> 
> - We are often copying free images or text from various sites (for 
> example flickr but other ones too). It happens that these sites go 
> offline or change their licenses later. Having such an archive, archived 
> by an independent organization, would be indisputable proof of copyright 
> status.

Personally I wouldn't rely on a flickr CC license as being in any way 
reliable.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Flickr_washing

I've seen too many AP photographs cropped to remove the AP attribute and 
uploaded to flickr as CC-BY to accept a flickr CC license at face value. 
In most cases the person doing so is probably taking stuff already 
cropped, and probably believes that if it is on the internet its public 
domain.

No university, publisher, or newspaper has used my CC licensed images 
either commercially or non-commercially without checking with me first 
that the work is actually CC licensed. They have always carried out some 
form of due diligence to ascertain that the image is either licensed 
properly, and that they get a specific license to reuse. IOW they obtain 
a 'paper trail' of permission.


> - Wikipedia often writes articles about current events, and these link 
> to various news organizations as sources. It happens sometimes that 
> these sources stealthily change their content for various reasons. Such 
> an archive, if it would be able to quickly follow Wikipedia's new links, 
> would be a strong deterrent against this Orwellian trend.
> 

If someone is making copies of web pages that is a copyright violation. 
Unless they have, in the US, specific exemption from the US Copyright 
Office, that can lead to some heavy legal issues. The internet archive 
happens to have limited permissions on obsolete games and software, but 
otherwise it respects copyright and robots.txt and applies the 
directives retroactively.

http://www.archive.org/about/terms.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Healthcare_Advocates.2C_Inc.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020923133856rn_1/www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/22/nyregion/22LOUI.html