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

[Tobias]

On 11/13/2013 08:40 AM, James Heilman wrote:
> Our biggest issue is copyright infringement.

When it comes to copyright infringement, among all community sites on 
the Internet, Wikipedia is one of the best to handle it. Many websites 
don't even bother with copyright unless they get a DMCA Takedown notice. 
We on the other hand have voluntary contributors checking pages and 
raising flags whenever there is even a suspicion of a copyright violation.

This seems to be highly effective in many cases. A few days ago, I wrote 
an email to a photographer, whose photos had been uploaded to Commons. 
He said I was the third to ask him whether he really had uploaded those 
images (which he had).

Unquestionably, there are also many instances where the systems fails 
and where lots of copyrighted material gets uploaded. Back in 2005, we 
had a case similar to the one you described in German Wikipedia, where 
various IPs copied content from old books. It is a big mess to clean up, 
but it can be done. And luckily the cases of massive copyvios are quite 
rare.

I think the community has done a very good job in the past 12 years when 
it comes to copyright. It is important to see that we are a community 
site – nothing is ever going to be perfect, and certainly we are not 
free of any copyright violations. But we are dealing with them in a very 
responsible way and I would say that our current efforts are sufficient.


Tobias