[WikiEN-l] Uploading images should be a privilige, not a right

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/21/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Here's one: when people send in a DMCA takedown notice, remove the
> material, notify the uploader that her materials have been removed
> (via their talk page and email if the address is known), and provide
> them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service
> provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed.
[snip]

Making this our practice for handling copyright would put us in a weak
position in several respects.

1) It is ethically questionable. When we distribute someone's
commercial work tagged as free content, we risk seriously letting the
genie out of the bottle. It would do us no good to gain a napster-like
reputation.
2) It creates panic-intensive situations.... When a violation is found
it's likely that there will be a lot of them creating a lot more work
to quickly clean up.
3) If we do enough of it, it wouldn't be hard to convince a judge that
our behavior is negligent (we already have a lot of egregious
infractions and we're trying.. I can only imagine what we'd have if we
didn't try) and get a lovely injunction issued that required us to
remove all images that we can't prove are free. :(

But most importantly:
4) Wikipedia is intended to be and advertised to be Free Content. By
only removing copyright violations that people have complained about
we would be choosing to fail at this goal... and in doing so we would
make the fruits of our labor less useful to the world.


In short, while being a nice legal fall-back, the safe harbor terms
are not anything we want to rely on in terms of our copyright policy.