[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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