[WikiEN-l] Copyrighted material on Wikipedia

Tue Oct 7 16:49:52 UTC 2003

>> How can you be using that argument if you don't believe that the court documents should be private?<<

Looks as though I wasn't expressing myself very clearly. I'll take another try.

I think that the court documents should be public.

I think that, barring objections from the coprygiht holder, the record of changes to remove copyright violations should be public. If the copyright holder objects, hiding them beats a legal fight, even though I think they are not a copyright infringement.

Google was served with a takedown notice and complied with it by removing the identified items from its search results. Presumably it also supplied a copy of the notice to the http://chillingeffects.org web site and it arranged for its search result page to point to the takedown notice, which in turn gave people all of the search results it had been asked to remove.

My assertion was that the Google action was roughly comparable to the Wikipedia leaving history entries visible, but not part of the main work, that it was likely that Google had obtained capable legal advice supporting its practice, and that this suggested that we should avoid over-reaction to takedown notices in the light of their practice.

Instead of delete, I advocated a notification to the copyright holder telling them about the history and inviting them to let us know whether it was objectionable to them, so they could choose to request that we remove the history if they wish. If they make the request, I suggest that we comply promptly (or expeditiously if they reply with another takedown notice).

As a seperate matter, I argued that if a private Wikipedia contributor wanted their personal information removed, we shouldn't let the GFDL release of the information inhibit us from being socially good and helping them to remove it, even though the GFDL release means we could ignore the request.

Does this clarify my views sufficiently to address your question? If not, please let me know which areas need further larification.