[Wikipedia-l] Copyrighted music on wikipedia.

[Gregory Maxwell]

In the past I've had disagreements with Raul about the copyright
status of some of the music he has been uploading.  In these cases he
has received permission from the recording artist, but the recording
artist may not have had the right to grant permission due to the music
itself being new and copyrighted, or due to the performer working off
copyrighted score.

Clearing rights for music is a complex and difficult area to deal
with, and I gave up arguing it with Raul at the time as it's clear
that his intentions were good and that we could deal with it when
someone finally complained.

However, Raul recently uploaded
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Morissette_-_Ironic.ogg

I brought this issue up to him, and his reply was that yes, it looks
somewhat fishy but the boilerplate copyright waver on a government
website should be sufficient.

I am pretty much without words on this. I think Raul's behavior on the
matter of music copyright is negligent. I know this is a harsh thing
to say, ... I gave him the benefit of the doubt on the classical
music, but there is no other way I can describe the uploading of the
Ironic song.

Overall, wikipedia's handling of material taken from government
websites has been playing it fast and loose (it's only PD if the
government created it, if they bought it from someone they might have
the right to distribute it, but *we* may not) but we've really stepped
over the line with this one.

We need to have a discussion of how to handle music copyright issues.