George Herbert wrote:
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?
(re-sent) 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.
That certainly works against him. Even if it's a valid picture it's sloppy editing and use of Autocad to leave artifacts like the book's spine.
These drawings, as engineering drawings, are as copyrightable as any other technical document or drawing... completely, in the US.
I was thinking in terms of age. Perhaps that's because I recently acquired a copy of Basil Lubbock's 1914 book "The China Clippers" which includes some interesting drawings of the construction of these ships.
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.
Are there no generic drawings for this kind of thing? I don't even want to touch the trade secrets issue, which we really can't address unless we have inside knowledge.
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.
So it would seem, with no bonus credits for being truthful.
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.
I think it's a reasonable but not necessary conclusion. A reasonable suspicion can certainly strenghthen the need for him to justify his claim. Giving him a week to respond should be enough. All but his first two edits to anything were done within a period of one hour two months ago, so he's unlikely to respond to questions. Once you have provided someone a generous opportunity to respond to a genuine concern, I see nothing wrong with getting rid of this material.
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.
I feel more concerned about people who jump to conclusions on this sort of thing. I think that identifying the source should be needed for immediate deletion. For most other situations that lack urgency, having the patience to wait for answers doesn't really hurt anything. ... and it keeps the temperature of events down.
Ec