[Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy

[Andrew Gray]

On 4 March 2010 19:41,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> Which means of course that a person could claim copyright to the very
> technology underlying Wikipedia, and demand the entire project be taken  down.
> In fact a different mentally ill person could make this claim every  month
> and force the project offline.
>
> That's the world you're advocating?  No responsibility on the part of  the
> office to even make the slightest attempt to verify the claim?

I think we're falling into the trap of constructing strawmen to fight here.

I don't think anyone is seriously claiming that if someone wrote to
the WMF claiming to hold the rights to the text of, oh, /Bleak House/,
that we would then be obliged to take a copy of it down - because the
claim itself is patently nonsensical and can be ignored.

But the fact that we can ignore patently invalid demands - and I am
quite sure we do, without a qualm - doesn't mean that we ought to feel
we can or should start adjudicating on the reasonableness of any
not-entirely-clear-cut case that turns up, such as this one...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk