[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] Deletion and copyrighted issues

[Brion VIBBER]

Anthere wrote:
>  We have a little issue on the fr.wikipedia, and I wondered whether that 
> kind of pb already occurred to you (probably did), and what you would do 
> about it.
> 
> Some time ago, a new user, Mulot, joined us. She started many articles 
> all related to religion. These articles were apparently results of 
> collaborations between her and other people she is related to. Very 
> valuable stuff imho. However, it appears that she doesnot fit with the 
> wiki project very well (hum, she got pretty hot with our comments and 
> modifications, though frankly light). Today, she just blew the lid off 
> (so to speak, would you say that ?). Put all her articles in the list 
> “to be deleted”. And said she wanted all of them to be deleted, as well 
> as the talk pages.
[...]
> So the questions I would ask
> 
> -         what rights does she have on pages ?

Under US copyright law, anything you write is your intellectual property 
and the copyright is owned by you unless you explicitly give or sell it 
away. I believe EU copyright law is the same in this respect, so there 
oughtn't to be any strange complications due to location of the author 
vs location of the server.

BUT... for anything she submitted to Wikipedia, she implicitly agreed to 
license it under the GFDL by not ignoring this message:

   IMPORTANT : Toutes les contributions Wikipedia sont publies sous la
   license "GNU Free Documentation License". Si vous n'acceptez pas que
   votre article soit modifi et redistribu sans votre autorisation, ne
   nous l'envoyez pas. Vous nous promettez galement d'tre l'auteur de cet
   article, ou de l'avoir recopi d'une source de donnes du domaine
   public. N'UTILISEZ PAS SANS PERMISSION DES DONNEES PROTEGEES PAR DES
   DROITS D'AUTEUR !!

The license can't really be withdrawn as far as I can tell; she can 
still do whatever she wants with her original text, but can't legally 
force Wikipedia to remove her material *unless she can prove that the 
license was not valid*. (Ie, that she did in fact not own the copyright 
and thus could not license it under GFDL, or possibly that the 
click-through license notice was not really binding.)

I'm not a lawyer, though.

> I specifically think of her personal page. Is a personal page somebody’s 
> property ? Intuitively, I would say yes, and I would say someone has the 
> right to delete his own page as well as the talk page attached. What is 
> the policy about that ?
> What is the “policy” about discussion pages ? Is one’s content of a 
> discussion page personal or not ?

Technically, personal and discussion pages are under the same GFDL 
license as the rest of the site. Someone duplicating Wikipedia (say, 
mirroring the site or pressing CD-ROM versions) would be free to include 
that material, or even reuse and modify it.

But as they're not _encyclopedia articles_ and are outside the primary 
purpose of the encyclopedia, I say it's perfectly fine if someone wants 
to delete their own personal page or their contributions on talk pages. 
(Whereas deleting an _article_ is detrimental to the project, and 
therefore rude and controversial.)

> -         what can we do against a deletion campaign ? Is there a 
> solution other than Aoineko keeping restoring pages until she gets tired 
> ? (in case you ask, she is probably not on a fixed IP)
> 
> -         what about the threat of the articles finally revealing 
> themselves copyrighted ?
>  To say the least, I am very troubled

If she in fact did not own the copyright and was not legally able to 
license her contributions under GFDL, we can't keep them. Of course, 
that would be equally true if she were still in love with the project!

If there's really doubt in the matter, it might be worthwhile to rewrite 
the articles from scratch using the originals only as sources of 
information. This should both be unambiguously legal and soothe her anger.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)