Alex756 (the lawyer) wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
>* A newly created article that's cut-n-pasted
from a non-FDL source
>without permission. If no good material has been added it can simply be
>deleted; if the cut-n-paste was _replaced_ bodily with good material, it's
>simple to delete the 'bad' revisions off the beginning and let the
'good'
>article's history stand on its own as if it were created separately.
Yes, there are lots of pages that are/have been
"blanked" because of
"copyright violations" and then they converted into a stub. Getting
rid of the original page with the violation info would be a useful thing
to do routinely. A page that has a "impure" page history could be
listed somewhere when someone finds it, and then the original page
could be blanked but the rest of the page history remains without the
violation (but possibly the mention that it happened). There must be
_thousands_ of pages like this already as one look at the VfD/copyvio
page shows that people are replacing violations with stubs all the time.
It may be a job finding all of them.
It may be a job indeed, and luckily a probably unnecessary one.
The "good" part of the DMCA is that we're not liable for these copyvios
unless our designated agent (which is Jimbo) receives an official notice.
Until he starts getting a lot of these, then he can just tell the developers
to remove each individual problematic version from the online database
(although it should be stored in a backup in case of errors).
If and when these start pouring in, then we can speed things up.
So far, I believe that he hasn't received a single one of these complaints.
>* A longstanding problem, where cut-n-pasted text
has been intermingled
>with original text over many revisions.
>This third case is the tricky one. How best to handle it?
That is the one where the copyright problem may be
removed. If Wikipedia
is about facts then if the text is edited so that it can't be
differentiated, then
it may not be an infringement. Probably best to keep editing it and leave
the "paper trail" to prove it has been edited beyond recognition. Probably
pages that have had only some but significant editing should be listed
somewhere to encourage more editing. It would be a shame to remove
text that has been edited over many generations. The diff function can
certain help one rewrite the article so that the content remains but the
form and structure has changed.
I think that this is the tricky case, because the history may still infringe.
As long as we get no complaints, then that's just fine and they all stay up.
But if we do get complaints, then there may be a quite contentious issue
as to which versions are infringements that must be removed and which aren't;
complicating this is how to give credit to the authors of the good text.
The best way to prevent this (besides avoiding infringement at first)
is to /completely/ rewrite any violation as soon as it is detected,
rather than letting it be slowly changed over the course of several edits.
Is there any possibility of putting a notice on the
history pages to show
they are there for _archival purposes only_? Do we really want to
encourage people to use older versions of articles anyway? If they link
to the article (as they should) then the link will bring one to the newest
version, not an infringing history version of it. This might be a much
simpler solution than creating a delete function (though it is encouraging
people to look into the histories for the infringing material) and the
delete function will certain clean up these old infringements.
They are IMO for archival purposes only, except for reverting things.
So a notice that reiterates this fact might be a very good idea.
It may not be necessary either, but at least it's easy to do.
>(Do we need a wikilegal-l list?)
I hope not! But maybe it is not a bad idea.
We'll doubtless need it someday.
-- Toby