[Wikipedia-l] "Copyright violation" question (just the opposite of what you think)

[Steve Callaway]

I have substantially refactored and will continue to refactor this article
until it does justice to a poet I rate in the very highest rank. It was a
straight cut and paste job from my original handout, and I never really
bothered to do much to it other than to expand my notes about Marina
Tsvetaeva's poetry. It looks very very jaded now, particularly in the light
of Viktoria Schweizer's biography. Some of it is just //wrong// e.g. the
Lily Feiler comments, the dates of Tsvetaeva's mother's TB, etc. We need
some way, however, of benchmarking our stuff which we import from our
private work, because otherwise this type of issue will surface from time to
time. Maybe a source comment on the /Talk page would be sufficient so that
people are aware of who's done what.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at nupedia.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 31, 2002 7:37 AM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] "Copyright violation" question (just the opposite of
what you think)


> I just had an interesting experience with an apparent copyright violation.
>
> The text in [[Marina Tsvetaeva]] is very similar and in many cases exactly
> the same as text in an external website. One user deleted the text in the
> article citing a copyright violation on our end. Even though I saw obvious
> similarities between our version and theirs I wasn't so sure /we/ were the
> ones who violated copyright because the article existed in pretty much the
> same form since before the move from the UseMod wikiware back in February.
>
> My suspicion that we in fact were not violating any copyright was
confirmed
> when user:sjc claimed authorship and stated that the text had been in the
> public domain for 12 years.
>
> I am not sure if the external website used the public domain version by
sjc
> or one of our earlier versions, but as Wikipedia grows we will
increasingly
> find apparent copyright violations on our end that are in fact just the
> opposite: other websites taking our text and using it in a way that is not
> compatible with our license (there is also the issue of public domain text
> too.... Remember, cite your sources!).
>
> What should we do in such cases? Furthermore, should we make a rule that
if a
> Wikipedia article "fails" the Google test AND is over a set number of
weeks
> old, then we should give the original contributor the benefit of the doubt
> and /not/ delete the text?
>
> We almost lost a great article on Marina Tsvetaeva and I don't want to
lose
> any others due to this type of mixup.
>
> --mav
>
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
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