[Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy

Ray Saintonge saintonge at telus.net
Sun Mar 7 00:16:32 UTC 2010


Andrew Gray wrote:
> 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...
>
>   

A lot of this comes down to a question of choosing your battles.  As 
much as I disagree with the validity of these notices this should not be 
WMF's fight. There is plenty of meat for individuals who want to take up 
the cudgels; that's how they accept personal responsibility: by putting 
their money where their mouths are instead of trying to pass the buck to 
the WMF.

A takedown notice needs to show where the material was originally 
published. TI would certainly not have published the keys themselves, so 
quoting them cannot be a copyvio of their rights unless it can be proven 
to be from stolen documents. As I understand it the hackers figured out 
the keys for themselves instead of copying them from elsewhere, so if 
there is any copyright it likely belongs to the hackers.

Ec



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