George Herbert wrote:
On 11/24/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
Rancom vaguely related topic question - What is
the right thing to do about
some obvious copyvios which I haven't figured out where the copying was from
yet? [[Ship construction]] has a bunch of images which claim to have been
done as original Autocad work for Wikipedia, and yet are clearly scans out
of ship design textbooks, some of which I recognize, but I haven't figured
out which books yet. The same person contributed them all, and some other
suspicious stuff.
There is nothing obvious about a copyvio when you can't identify its
source. You may have very strong suspicions about the matter, but that
does not establish the fact. I don't know what the standards are for
drawings in ship construction, but I'm sure that there are bound to be
some aspects that will be constant. Are these even copyrightable?
(re-sent) Ec
Well, we know for a fact that the credit (Autocad-self) is wrong, since you
can see the book's spine in the scans in several of the images, and the page
number in some as well.
That certainly works against him. Even if it's a valid picture it's
sloppy editing and use of Autocad to leave artifacts like the book's spine.
These drawings, as engineering drawings, are as
copyrightable as any other
technical document or drawing... completely, in the US.
I was thinking in terms of age. Perhaps that's because I recently
acquired a copy of Basil Lubbock's 1914 book "The China Clippers" which
includes some interesting drawings of the construction of these ships.
In terms of the information within them, that's
generally not copyrightable
or patentable or trademarkable - it might be a trade secret, but not after
being put in a published book.
Are there no generic drawings for this kind of thing? I don't even want
to touch the trade secrets issue, which we really can't address unless
we have inside knowledge.
If he *had* gone and redrawn them in Autocad or
something, it would be
fine. I've redrawn a number of illustrations in other technical articles to
do that. But these particular images clearly are scans, and not redrawn.
So it would seem, with no bonus credits for being truthful.
It's remotely possible that they're scanned
with permission, but they aren't
listed properly. Given that you can clearly and obviously see the book in
the scans, and the claimed source clearly isn't, I was assuming that the
obvious conclusion was reasonably and necessarily that they're copyvios.
I think it's a reasonable but not necessary conclusion. A reasonable
suspicion can certainly strenghthen the need for him to justify his
claim. Giving him a week to respond should be enough. All but his
first two edits to anything were done within a period of one hour two
months ago, so he's unlikely to respond to questions. Once you have
provided someone a generous opportunity to respond to a genuine concern,
I see nothing wrong with getting rid of this material.
If WP policy is that I have to produce what they're
violating for anyone to
take action, that's fine, but anyone who looks at them should be able to
tell that the claimed origin isn't, and that they came out of a bound book
via a scanner. I find it hard to believe that anyone who actually looks at
the images could think they were autocad drawings.
I feel more concerned about people who jump to conclusions on this sort
of thing. I think that identifying the source should be needed for
immediate deletion. For most other situations that lack urgency, having
the patience to wait for answers doesn't really hurt anything. ... and
it keeps the temperature of events down.
Ec