[WikiEN-l] YouTube links

[Ray Saintonge]

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

>On Thu, 4 Jan 2007 16:07:43 +0100, "Erik Moeller" <erik at wikimedia.org>
>wrote:
>  
>
>>By that same logic, we ought not link to any site hosted on a free
>>webspace provider like Yahoo!, since many of the sites hosted there
>>contain copyright violations. I think that would be an excessive
>>position that would deprive us from many useful external links.
>>Moreover, many videos which are "copyvio" by Wikipedia's standards may
>>well be found to be fair use by US legal standards.
>>Use common sense please.
>>    
>>
>I am using common sense.  I am absolutely not suggesting that we don't
>link to YouTube period.  If the video has a valid fair use rationale
>on YouTube then it's not a copyright violation.  What I'm proposing is
>that we don't ignore the copyright status of YouTube links, since a
>lot of them are copyright violations and that could get us in trouble.
>As always I advocate a Clue-based approach, but some people seem to
>want to legislate anti-Clue.  Jjay's version was best: *do not link to
>material that violates copyright*.  Neat but not gaudy.
>
A policy that presumes material to be an infringement is certainly 
"anti-Clue".  Imposing Wikipedia's rules about a fair use rationale on 
YouTube pages is cluelessly ignoring common sense. Nobody is arguing 
that we should ignore the copyright status of YouTube.  Some may indeed 
be copyright violations, but you don't even offer any evidence to show 
which proportion of them are, and we don't have the staff or resources 
to properly investigate a single one of those. 

To say "do not link to material that violates copyright" is fine if you 
_know_ that it violates copyright.  Onw should not extrapolate from that 
to any page which is speculated to be a copyvio.  Doing that would be 
utterly absurd and clueless.

Ec