From: "Brion Vibber" <brion(a)pobox.com>
> Is there any possibility of putting a notice on
the history pages to
show
they are there
for _archival purposes only_?
I'm not sure I understand how that would be in any way different from
their present purpose. Archival or not, we're distributing those
revisions to the public.
Right now the assumption is that everything on Wikipedia is GFDL, there
is nothing stated that the history pages are not GFDL released, stating that
they are not to be linked to directly or copied is discouraging those pages
from being used for any purpose, except fair use which is always allowed,
(even if what fair use might be it is very confusing). Anyone who accuses
Wikipedia of infringement in those cases would be told that those pages
are not generally available to search engines and that they are only for
research and private study; it is important to point out that even if there
is infringement there has to be damages and sometimes those damages are
nominal, the jury only awards one dollar as the copyright owner has not
suffered any real damage from the infringement even if the fair use defense
is unsuccessful. I am doubtful that any judge would award a plaintiff
statutory damages when it was not Wikipedia that posted the infringing
material and volunteers tried their best to remove all traces of the
infringement from the publicly released version.
Fair use would certainly cover graduate students writing theses, others
who are looking into page histories including anyone doing
a due dillegence search on the copyright origins of any page.
I am all for keeping the paper trail intact (except perhaps for deleting the
earliest page of those pages that were created with infringing material
and then blanked and filled with a stub, or keeping the original entry
but just blanking the infringing material).
You are right a strong policy needs to be created so that such a function,
even if available only to a few developers or the sysops keeps the database
otherwise intact. The integrity of the database has an important function in
relation to the GFDL. Also, we do not want to be accused of destroying
or hiding evidence (though I guess there are historical back ups that can
always be retrieved if there is a subpeona issued).
Alex756