[Foundation-l] Foundation policy on linking to website that violates copyright

Tue Apr 14 18:57:50 UTC 2009

On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Ilya Schurov <ilya.schurov at noo.ru> wrote:
<snip>
> They say that we put excessive burden on the editors and it is simply
> not necessary to investigate facts of copyright violation on third-party
> websites (at least, since there are no requests from copyright holders),
> because we have no explicit statements of the Foundation that we have to
> do it.
<snip>

On the narrow issue of en:WP:C and Intellectual Reserve v. Utah
Lighthouse Ministry, neither is expected to impose a positive burden
on editors.  The court case is predicated on the fact that they
already knew they were linking to copyright violations and continued
to do so intentionally.

The enwiki policy is simply a statement that we will remove links if
we become aware that they are associated with copyvios, but it is fine
for an ordinarily editor to link to anything unless he has already
become aware of a problem.  No editor is required or expected to do
copyright investigations before adding a normal link.

-Robert