On 11/24/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
Rancom vaguely related topic question - What is the right thing to do
about
some obvious copyvios which I haven't figured out where the copying was
from
yet? [[Ship construction]] has a bunch of images which claim to have
been
done as original Autocad work for Wikipedia, and yet are clearly scans
out
of ship design textbooks, some of which I recognize, but I haven't
figured
out which books yet. The same person contributed them all, and some
other
suspicious stuff.
There is nothing obvious about a copyvio when you can't identify its source. You may have very strong suspicions about the matter, but that does not establish the fact. I don't know what the standards are for drawings in ship construction, but I'm sure that there are bound to be some aspects that will be constant. Are these even copyrightable?
(resent) Ec
Well, we know for a fact that the credit (Autocad-self) is wrong, since you can see the book's spine in the scans in several of the images, and the page number in some as well.
These drawings, as engineering drawings, are as copyrightable as any other technical document or drawing... completely, in the US.
In terms of the information within them, that's generally not copyrightable or patentable or trademarkable - it might be a trade secret, but not after being put in a published book.
If he *had* gone and redrawn them in Autocad or something, it would be fine. I've redrawn a number of illustrations in other technical articles to do that. But these particular images clearly are scans, and not redrawn.
It's remotely possible that they're scanned with permission, but they aren't listed properly. Given that you can clearly and obviously see the book in the scans, and the claimed source clearly isn't, I was assuming that the obvious conclusion was reasonably and necessarily that they're copyvios.
If WP policy is that I have to produce what they're violating for anyone to take action, that's fine, but anyone who looks at them should be able to tell that the claimed origin isn't, and that they came out of a bound book via a scanner. I find it hard to believe that anyone who actually looks at the images could think they were autocad drawings.