Jimmy Wales jwales at
bomis.com
Tue Sep 2 10:27:28 UTC 2003 said:
Marco Krohn wrote:
On another
front, it is often alleged that _true_ "fair use" of some
non-FDL material (both text and images) _is_ compatible with the FDL.
I might missed that, but what does "true fair use" mean?
Here's some excellent reading material:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-c.ht…
The whole site is excellent.
As you read over the case summaries, you'll begin
to get a sense of
how puzzling this doctrine can be.
Yes, that is true, but is anyone really going to sue Wikipedia because
a samll snippet of text or a photo that is informational is found on the
web site? And anyway, what are the damages; at most the statutory
damages; after reading all those cases Jimbo I am sure you can
convince a federal judge that Wikipedia should have a fair use defense.
I think it's pretty clearly that there will be lots
of cases where
*we* are on solid ground, but where potential re-users of our content
will not be. I think that's problematic.
Two points, first:as regards to fair use of text that is not attributed;
it probably gets edited in subsequent revisions; so when does a
collaborative text that is being changed constantly become a new text?
That would make an interesting case; might even get Wikipedia's
name into all the copyright law treatises; it is sort of like saying you
cannot make photocopies of something when you are writing a paper;
as long as the final paper is not a copy any information that was in
the photocopies does go into your paper.
Second: Is it implied that Wikipedia gives no guarantee regarding
the material posted on Wikipedia? It is true that for pictures there is an
affirmation (more reason that Wikipedia is not responsible as their are
reliance issues there). Perhaps Stallman and Lessig (and I have not
discussed that with them) see no problem with fair use stuff because
most users of the GNU FDL include warranty disclaimers as the FDL
provides for them in the last paragraph of Section 1. If subsequent
users have a problem they only have to remove the text or image;
as far as downstream distribution is concerned, one only has to include
a disclaimer regarding possible infringement. It makes perfeect sense
to disclaim copyright warranties in a wiki environment. Except for
the deletion poliicy there is no guarantee that Wikipedia is copyright
infringement free; it is the contributors that must guarantee that
not, Wikipedia; the more I think about it the more I feel that this is
the the best way to deal with the copyright/privacy rights issues on a
wiki.
There has been a recent related discussion here:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Votes_for_deletion/copyvio
Maybe adding a disclaimer is a good idea; anyway trying to keep
Wikipedia copyright pure is not a bad idea either. BTW why is there not a
little check box on the edit pages that is similar to the check box on
image upload pages giving an affirmation about the copyright of submitted
text?
Quaere: Is it possible to creat a function to delete parts of a page's
history
if the history is found to have an infringement on it. That would be a
way to clean up the many infringements that are posted on previous page
versions (which are also listed as being released under the GFDL); though
if the fair use policy applies to the current versions; there is even a
stronger
argument for fair use applying to
alex756 (remember, even though IAAL this is NALO (not a legal opinion).