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

[Marc A. Pelletier]

On 11/13/2013 04:41 PM, Tobias wrote:
> 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.

I think that's the best way of summing it up.  "Sufficient" is a vague
metric, and leaves room for improvement, but the nutshell is that the
community /does/ take copyright violations seriously and deploys very
good efforts to curtail it.

Do some slip through?  Yes, without doubt.  Are they eliminated with
prejudice the second they are noticed?  Yes.

The Wikimedia projects are no worse than any other collected works when
it comes to copyright infringement and indeed tends to handle it with
more vigilance than the other sites in the top 10 (proactively, rather
than reactively).

Could we do better?  No doubt.  Is improvement so desperately critical
that we should drop everything else to concentrate on that?  Not a
chance.  And I speak as the author and (for a long time) maintainer of
one of the most visible and used copyright violation detection tool used
on our project (CorenSearchBot, now handled by MadmanBot and - last I
heard - used on around a dozen projects).

-- Marc