Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
On 30 May 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
Having a status flag in the database would be very
helpful for forkers,
but we should not encourage uploading photos under licenses that limit
redistribution. But a little more Linus Torvalds style pragmatism and a
little less Richard Stallman style zealotry wouldn't hurt either.
And end up being sued like Linus?
I agree with Erik on this. Simply guessing that something is copyright
doesn't make it so. It's all a question of whether you interpret
copyright laws liberally in favour of the user or liberally in favour of
the putative copyright owner. The fear of being sued is a red herring;
we are very far from any possibility that such a thing might happen.
With the safe harbor provisions of copyright law we would have ample
opportunity to remove offending material before it went that far.
Notification of copyright violation would have to come first from the
copyright OWNER or his AUTHORIZED representative, not from some
disinterested 3rd party do-gooder with unschooled guesses about what the
law says.
Effectively violating copyright is very easy to do. I have hundreds of
copyright books in my personal library that I could scan with OCR
software, and add into a Wikipedia article without anyone EVER realizing
it. That wouldn't make it right, but I'm confident that nobody would
ever call my hand on it. If I can do it so can any other contributor,
so let's not be naive about this.
Of course, if a copyright violation is flagrant and obvious it should be
removed. Unfortunately, most alleged violations are not that clear, and
we should give the contributor the benefit of the doubt without
descending into copyright paranoia.
Eclecticology