[WikiEN-l] NPG copyright irony

[David Gerard]

On 20 March 2011 18:13, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:

> You would need to identify the point in
> times at which the word structure of the current sentences emerge and
> who wrote them. Given that others have contributed to this article,
> you would need to be sure that they did not contribute to the wording
> of the copied text. If they did contribute, you would need to work
> together with them on what action (if any) to take.


There are other approaches, of course, than that of full-frontal
action for copyright violation.

The first thing is likely to be to quietly approach them and ask
nicely for licence compliance, since it's really easy. I would
*always* advise this as the first approach to take, since it's the
thing we actually want and we're all really nice and stuff.

(Escalation, should that fail conclusively, would probably usefully
involve the blogosphere and then the media, in that order. This will
then rekindle the debate over enclosure of public domain resources,
which we would want to approach with care so as not to joggle the
elbow of those working productively with pretty much every other
museum in the world, who have all been a lot saner and who we don't
want to frighten unduly. Etc., etc. We *could* make a big public fuss,
but I'm not entirely sure that would actually get us what we want.)

(This does not, of course, in any way say that pissed-off Wikipedia
contributors are not absolutely entitled to be pissed off, especially
considering that the NPG *still* thinks they can enclose the public
domain, and that the NPG's idea of flagging a problem is to start with
lobbing a nuke, never mind it went off in their faces. I merely mean
to gently suggest taking a deep breath for consideration before taking
further action.)


- d.