[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[Ray Saintonge]

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

>On Fri, 06 Apr 2007 07:26:50 -0500, Rich Holton wrote:
>  
>
>>Here is where I see the crux of the issue in this thread: you are not 
>>interested in keeping the information in question. You do not value it. 
>>You are willing to eliminate it at request (which is all that their 
>>reply could possibly be seen as).
>>    
>>
>And you are wrong in your assertion.  I am interested in the article
>subject, I just don't think we may or should include the list in its
>entirety.
>
>Yes, I am prepared to eliminate it on request.  I am prepared to
>eliminate *any* asserted copyright on request, and allow it back in
>only when it is established that it does not violate copyright.  We
>get a steady trickle of complaints of copyright violation, and we
>generally *do* remove them.
>
While the development of the thread makes it easy to impute motives to 
Guy, those motivations do not help us to solve the copyright question..  
I have never supported the idea that just because somebody alleges their 
ownership of a copyright they must presumably be right.  It is a clear 
basis for further investigation.  If, after a very brief investigation, 
the facts do not support the claim, there should be no obligation to 
take down the material.  The claimant should then be invited to make a 
formal request, and fairly guided to the proper procedure. 

Even when material has a prima facie basis for take down, he should be 
advised that since his claim was essentially made ex parte, other views 
of the law may arise, that the deleted material may be restored, and if 
so he should again be prepared to make a formal request.

>Wikipedia/Wikimedia was established (and I hope continues to exist) to 
>make information freely available. Caving in to unreasonable claims of 
>copyright is not the way to do that.
>
Absolutely.

>You are, I think, confusing free-as-in-beer with free-as-in-speech. We
>are not allowed to include content that violates other people's
>copyright, and this is not in any way seen as incompatible with
>Wikipedia's mission.  
>
Nobody is arguing that we should violate the copyrights of others.  
Disagregating the two types of freedom is not always a straightforward task.

>Removing unfree content has never been incompatible with Wikipedia's
>mission to make information freely available. We do it all the time.
>
It doesn't matter if the inputs are free as long as the outputs are 
free.  If an unfree input can be transformed into a free output that is 
consistent with our mission.

>>Note that I'm not saying that their claim would be unreasonable--I am 
>>not an expert in copyright law. But your position is that their mere 
>>request should result in our removing the information, when the question 
>>of whether this is a copyright violation is still very much in question.
>>    
>>
>Yes.  The request of any rights owner should always be respected, even
>if that respect takes the form of removing the content, debating,
>proving that the claim to rights is invalid, and re-inserting. 
>
A rights claimant is not necessarily the rights owner.  That can be an 
important factor in copyright suits.  As a part of his suit the claimant 
must prove that he owns the right to sue.  This effectively prevents 
claims from people who have no business making them.

Ec