[Foundation-l] Foundation policy on linking to website that violates copyright

Tue Apr 14 19:11:43 UTC 2009

Robert Rohde wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Ilya Schurov <ilya.schurov at noo.ru> wrote:
> <snip>
>> They say that we put excessive burden on the editors and it is simply
>> not necessary to investigate facts of copyright violation on third-party
>> websites (at least, since there are no requests from copyright holders),
>> because we have no explicit statements of the Foundation that we have to
>> do it.
> <snip>
> 
> On the narrow issue of en:WP:C and Intellectual Reserve v. Utah
> Lighthouse Ministry, neither is expected to impose a positive burden
> on editors.  The court case is predicated on the fact that they
> already knew they were linking to copyright violations and continued
> to do so intentionally.
> 
> The enwiki policy is simply a statement that we will remove links if
> we become aware that they are associated with copyvios, but it is fine
> for an ordinarily editor to link to anything unless he has already
> become aware of a problem.  No editor is required or expected to do
> copyright investigations before adding a normal link.
Yes, it's clear. Nobody is going to require editors to do copyvio 
investigation of third-party resources before linking them. It's a 
conflict resolution matter: e.g. one editor claim that some site 
violates copyright and therefore we shouldn't link there, while the 
other editor try to put this link into the article and argue that 
copyright issues are not important here. ArbCom believes that the site 
under consider indeed violates copyright. Should we consider this as an 
argument to remove such link, or just ignore it?

-- 
Regards,
Ilya Schurov.