[WikiEN-l] NPG copyright irony

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 10:22 AM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 March 2011 10:11, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> What should happen here and what implications does it have for
>> copyright situations? Can you claim copyright on a piece of text
>> buried deep in page history, many months or years ago, that has since
>> been extensively rewritten? Does the amount of time it was visible and
>> published in the Wikipedia article matter (this can range from seconds
>> to years)? Can website E legitimately claim copyright on the text if
>> they are the only ones publishing it and the Wikipedia article
>> currently says something different?
>>
>> I think I know the answers to these questions, but am not sure, so
>> want to see what others think.
>
> Copyright exists as soon as something is published in a fixed form.
> Which includes any given wikipedia edit. Subsequent edits have no
> impact on this.

An analogy in printed works would be if all copies of a book were
burned or no longer existed, but an existing work had copied that work
without attribution. In terms of online works, I'm really not sure how
it works. If a website was publishing at one point in the past, and is
no longer there now, how do you prove the work was ever published? I'm
not sure using the WayBack machine would really work as a way of
proving that a website was at one point publishing something, but I'm
sure this has been considered before.

In Wikipedia terms, imagine that all the old page versions vanished,
and all you had was the current version and no page history. This is
what a printed version of Wikipedia would be like. This is,
admittedly, not likely to happen (all the old page versions becoming
inaccessible). But what about deleted revisions of a page? Especially
those page revisions deleted because of unrelated copyvio issues that
meant the page revision had to be deleted, even if some of it didn't
infringe copyright?

The sequence there goes:

1) Unrelated copyvio inserted
2) Text ABC created by Wikipedia editor
3) Text ABC copied by external wesite without attribution
4) Text ABC altered to text XYZ by another Wikipedia editor
5) Unrelated copyvio reverted and page revisions 1 2 and 4 deleted

In that sort of situation, how do you prove that text ABC was
originally written on Wikipedia? Remember that deleted revisions are
subject to being deleted at any time. However, I think that copyvio
revision deletions should be kept in perpetuity because the way
revision deletion currently works, a lot of genuine non-copyright
violating revisions made before the copyvio is spotted, get thrown out
as well.

Carcharoth