[Wikipedia-l] Concern related to copyright problem handling

[Mark Williamson]

I think, at least in the US, substantial changes to every paragraph of
the article are good enough for it to be considered a "derived work",
but I don't know if that would include just adding a sentence or two
onto the end of each paragraph.

Mark

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:25:23 -0500, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am concerned that the current handling of copyright problems on
> wikipedia may be insufficient.  As it stands, after detection the
> offending text is completely removed.
> 
> Unfortunately, if there has been a long time span since the insertion
> of the infringing text there may have been a substantial number of
> valuable contributions to the article. With the way that  most content
> grows organically over time, it may be very difficult to say if the
> new text would have been created without the infringing text with any
> certainty.
> 
> In the United States the recent tendency in court appears to be to
> favor the most expansive definition of a derived work possible.
> Because of this, I suspect that it would be likely that at least some
> of the contributions made to an article after the insertion of
> infringing text would be found by a US court to be derived, thus
> placing their ownership in question.  This interpretation of derived
> isn't necessitated by current international treaty, and would likely
> be different (and possibly more sane) in other locations, but I
> suspect that US legality is a substantial concern.
> 
> Determining if a piece of text is derived from another, at least in
> the over broad sense favored by US courts, is an intractable problem,
> but the policy could do a better job of avoiding these concerns.
> Reverting to the point where a substantial amount of infringing text
> was added, and deleting *all* modifications after that point would be
> much more certain to avoid impinging on the intellectual property
> rights of others.
> 
> The cost of destroyed improvements might be mitigated by the benefit
> of creating a greater incentive for frequently contributors to quickly
> catch and remove violating text.
> 
> Of course, none of this is legal advice...
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