[Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant in the room

[Fæ]

On 13 November 2013 07:40, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> Our biggest issue is copyright infringement.
...

Thanks for raising this James.

Yes, this is an issue but if you are gunning for elephants this month,
I really don't think the copyright elephant is the biggest one in the
herd.

As a practical example of the tools we already have in place,
yesterday I was facilitating an edit-a-thon for women in science with
King's College London and we had one of the example stubs we had
created on the English Wikipedia up on a projector. Within literally
*minutes* of creation it had been (correctly) flagged by a bot as a
possible copyright violation as some of the text had been cut & past
from King's own website; one of the participants quickly re-wrote it
using their own words. As the communications manager was sitting next
to me at the time, no doubt she found this rather reassuring, even
though in parallel she was asking about how best to "officially"
release text. :-)

We have a more complex problem with how images uploaded to Wikimedia
Commons can be flagged where they match images found elsewhere on the
internet, this is something that may be done by a future bot but we
might need to partner with someone like Google Images or Tineye to
make this truly effective. Having run my own experimental bots on this
area, I would love to see this become a funded project.

PS with regard to OTRS verification, we could do with better standards
for verification, at the moment volunteers like myself are left to use
our own judgement about what checks to make. I tend to double check
text or images being released with Google, just in case, as well as
doing "whois" checks on email domains. These sorts of checks could
become part of OTRS guidelines and would make the reliability of OTRS
tickets a notch higher.

Cheers,
Fae
-- 
faewik at gmail.com http://j.mp/faewm