On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 21:55:24 +0100, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 16 Nov 2004 10:58:37 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
"Or are you happy to contribute copyright violations as long as they are 'in the target language'?"
If I were me, I'd ask Angela to apologise if she asked me to apologise.
I think that's a quite reasonable thing to ask. You took a text from a website, and put it on Wikipedia. In my book that's a copyright violation. Your argument that it was a government website does not hold water - US government publications are free of copyright, but other countries have other rules. In general, it is a bad thing to take texts from other sites unless they specifically state that they are not under copyright.
It's not what she asked, it's the way she asked it. Had I said the same thing in the reverse situation, you would probably be telling me I should apologise to her.
And how do you know I haven't checked the copyright laws that are applicable in this case? Also, since another site based in that country similarly used them without any attribution but attributed all other works to their respective authors and sometimes gave copyright and permission notices, I think that, given the multitude of sources used by that site, it is not unreasonable to trust their judgement especially when added to the facts: It was published by a governmental organisation and was not sold but rather distributed freely. Also, if you take into account the social and political tendencies of the government in question, there is quite a different conclusion than for countries which are highly protective of government works. There is no royalty (one common reason for such measures), there is no totalitarian regime (another reason), and their economic views would not generally support such laws.
If you want to tell me that it *is* illegal and show me your sources, I will be happy to put copyvio notices up myself.
Mark