From: "Vicki Rosenzweig" <vr(a)redbird.org> At 08:47 AM 11/15/03 -0500, Alex756 wrote: They t#Articles_with_issues NO. A reasonable time is being interpreted as 24 hours on the internet. If Wikipedia authors do not assert their rights they will lose them. I do not think it is antithetical to the purposes of Wikipedia because if Wikipedia wanted to give it away it would all be put into the public domain. It is not in the public domain, it is under a complex license that needs to be followed. If it is not followed people should not be allowed to ignore the license. Then Wikipedia may be nothing more than a free for all, anyone can copy anything and use it anyway they want without any fear of the copyright laws that are their to protect the authors who are making their valuable contributions and have an expectation that those contributions will be linked back to Wikipedia. If the takedown notice is followed the copyright infringer still has the right to follow the GFDL policy and then they will obviously have the right to use the material. I do not see how using the OCILLA provisions are against Wikipedia. Actually they make the GFDL stronger in my "nonlegal" opinion. Once again this discussion should be on the Wikilegal discussion list that is what it was created for. Alex756

Axel Boldt wrote: Who defends the public domain?

Ray Saintonge wrote: Material that's in the public domain remains in the public domain forever. Nobody can attack it and nobody can defend it. You can slap a bogus copyright notice on a public domain work, but that does not change its public domain status. Axel

On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 09:21:44PM +0100, Axel Boldt wrote: I don't understand. Could you please explain how your contributions are PD? The edit pages say: "Please note that all contributions to Wikipedia are considered to be released under the GNU Free Documentation License". Do you mean to say that you've also put it up at some other site as PD? Even in that case, chessandbeyond copied it from wikipedia, and so they're still bound by the terms of the GFDL. Arvind -- Its all GNU to me

On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 10:03:38PM -0800, Delirium wrote: OK. It certainly looks like a derived work; looking at the page history there are authors with significant contributions other than Prof. Boldt. In any case, it does not affect the overall claim of copyright violation, since they have copied about a dozen articles. Arvind -- Its all GNU to me

It has been suggested that User:NightCrawler is the hard banned user DW. Could someone look at the logs to see what ISP he's posting from, and if the addressed match those of DW? He is more than a problem user, he has already driven a new user away, and is making threats to other users that are eerily familiar to those of DW. RickK --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard

Alex R. wrote: 7 days seems more reasonable. If they are a business (and they do offer goods for sale) they might not even be there to receive the message on a weekend. You're not going to get any argument from Wikipedians against the philosophical and theoretical basis of what you just said. It was at least a year ago that I commented that the violation of Wikipedia copyrights will be a much bigger problem than violations by Wikipedians. It is relatively easy to develop policies to deal with the latter circumstances, and I think that what we have done is fairly conservative, meaning that we could probably have given ourselves a much greater benefit of the doubt. The present problem will become more difficult as the years go on. To start with the violations will become harder to find, and will likely only be discovered as a matter of sheer luck. When we do discover them we need a strategy that will work. There is more to that strategy than trying to decipher legal texts. Assuming naïveté on the part of the violator is a good first start. A friendly letter of explanation suggesting possible solutions is a good first start, providing we at least give them enough time to respond. The amount of time should vary. If the violator has a site with many of our pages, it may suffice to see a steady progress in making the needed change. A legal take-down notice is a logical second step, and the timing here will often depend on time limits provided in the law. Beyond that, if the violator refuses, what strategies are available? Beginning a legal action may not be the best next step. The choice of legal jurisdiction would only be a part of the problem. Legal actions can be costly, especially if we want them to be effective. Who would be responsible for those costs? If there were someone with deep enough pockets to foot that kind of bill, we could only drool at the kind of computer hardware that that could buy. It would be immoral to expect Jimbo alon to be responsible for the costs of an action that could have far reaching implications about attempted claims of copyright on material that is in one way or another already freely available to the general community for its re-use. Protecting the public interest is a public sector function. To some extent that comes into conflict with sincerely held Libertarian ideals which depend very much on the freedom and sense of responsibility of the individual. Of course, there are too many big-buck vested interests involved with government for them to be a dependable ally. If push comes to shove, strategic alliances may be required. Choosing the right opponent to go after will be important; a US based violator will at least avoid the problems that come with international law. Are there other strategies available before it gets to the courts? Some of us would prefer not to subscribe to yet another list. :-) This is too important to be relegated to a low traffic list. Ec

Alex R. wrote: Or a mandamus requiring that they give appropriate credits, maybe even achieving the effect that whatever original material they added themselves becomes subject to to FDL. That would be a more fitting result than just winning a lump of money. Of course, the easy options should normally be tried first. This is a precautionary move. It should probably be done quarterly, given the frequency of change in the Wikipedia corpus. Most countries properly find the extraterritorial application of US law objectionable. If you start an action against a foreign defendant, he may not show up. There would be a default judgement, perhaps even fully enforceable in the defendant's home country. That really accomplishes nothing. The action was not primarily for the money. Only one violator is knocked off the net, and no precedents are set for the future. What are we trying to accomplish? The verb "create" makes this an offensive comment. I wouldn't count on that. This issue will affect more people than those who sit on the Wikilegal list. Ec

On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 02:42:05PM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote: I agree with all this. I was looking at [[Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content]] for the first time and I was surprised at the extent/number of sites that we *know* about and have issues. NationMaster (which has the entire wikipedia content) though listed as compliant violates the spirit of the license by putting the GFDL notice in an unreadably small font. 4reference, in spite of a letter and a warning, is not compliant (again entire wikipedia content). A lot of times I see 4reference copies of wikipedia articles ranked higher by google than the source article. I don't like this. Another thing I noticed is that many (most?) of the sites violating GFDL don't know about it until we tell them about it. This is easily preventable and shouldn't be happening! I want to suggest a couple of things to ensure this: * that we change the "From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" line. As we know very well when people see "free" they think gratis, not libre. I suggest we make it "From wikipedia, the open-content encyclopedia" with the word open-content linking to the copyrights page. * at the bottom of each article we should remind people about their _obligations_ in copying it. Something along the lines of "if you wish to redistribute this article you must link back to this page and release it under the GFDL. See <here> for details" or something like that. IMHO we should also be more vigorous in pursuing violators. Why are people saying this is antithetical to sharing? We are preventing them from *putting restrictions* on our free articles. Writing a legal notice is costly, that's a valid point. But we'll have to do it sometime, haven't we? Otherwise we lose credibility. And since we (presumably) have to write a template letter only once, the cost is amortized. I hope we never actually need to go to court. IANAL, of course. Arvind -- Its all GNU to me

--On Sunday, November 16, 2003 11:27 AM -0500 "Alex R." &lt;alex756(a)nyc.rr.com&gt; wrote: Corporations do it through lawyers because it's worth it to them to make sure the case isn't thrown out due to failure to dot all the i's. I agree that Wikipedia should be registered as copyright - that basically requires sending a form to the government and paying a fee that was (when last I checked) in the range of 20-30 USD. Nathan

Arvind Narayanan wrote: Well, "the free encyclopedia" has sort of become our "tagline". Plus, it's been translated into most languages (Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre, etc) so I think interlanguage co-ordination would be required to move on that. I agree with your second point -- we could do to make the licence text at the foot of the page a bit clearer.