[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)

Sun Feb 21 13:28:15 UTC 2010

On 21 February 2010 10:33, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2010/2/21 Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>:
>> Tomasz Ganicz wrote:
>>> 2010/2/20 Ray Saintonge:
>>>
>>>> Probabilistic arguments are difficult to establish when the majority
>>>> still believes in legal certainty in the same way that it believes in God.
>>>>
>>> I am not quite sure what you wanted to say :-) Anyway - this cited
>>> sentence is for me a nice expression of "0 tolerance" copyright
>>> paranoia definition. In fact, most attorneys  say usually to their
>>> clients that there is nothing like legal certainty as long as the
>>> court verdict is known and being innocent does not give you 100%
>>> probability that you won't be sentenced as guilty. Everyone can be a
>>> suspect of committing a crime and it is just a matter of probability
>>> that vast majority of people are not taken to jail. This is just
>>> because the number of beds in jails is limited :-)
>>>
>>>
>> My apologies if my analogy wasn't clear.  Many people tend to treat the
>> Bible as the word of God that must be valid in all circumstances,
>> choosing to ignore any ridiculous results that that may produce.
>> Similarly, people unfamiliar with law also tend toward a strict
>> interpretation of statute without regard to any other influences, or
>> without any understanding of the body of judicial interpretation that
>> surrounds those statutes.
>>
>
> Yes.. This is typical adminship POV on Wikimedia Commons nowadays and
> it spreads to many other Wikimedia projects including meta, as more
> and more Wikimedia projects decides to transfer all of their files to
> Commons. Legal decision should be taken out from project's communities
> "jurisdiction"  and given into hands of professional lawyers or at
> least people who had copyright law practical training. Otherwise
> things are based on current flows of moods of amorphous communities,
> which is quite often unpredictable and has very little in common with
> real legal problems, or it is even sometimes based on false over
> interpretation of law imposed by copyright paranoia guerillas. On
> Commons it is so easy to start deletion process and vast majority of
> cases are not analyzed by anyone who has a real, practical knowledge
> about copyright law. Just add copyvio template and with around 6-7
> hours your picture is deleted.

Not so. For example this lot still exist although pretty much
everything in the category is a copyvio.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Murals_in_Derry

Not even UK Freedom of panorama is that broad. It's actualy quite a
bit of work to kill of all but the most obvious copyvios.

-- 
geni