[WikiEN-l] New proposal for summary eletion of non-copyright infringing material, on suspicion

Mon Dec 5 08:26:18 UTC 2005

Jtkiefer wrote:

> I'm not worried about IMDB either, IMD like Amazon and a bunch of 
> other places claims copyrights that they can't actually claim since it 
> isn't their stuff to begin with.  A good example of this is 
> actor/actress listings in movies which aren't theirs to copyright same 
> with book cover images since the publisher not amazon holds the right 
> to the image on the book cover and amazon cannot take that away from 
> them just from being a resaler of the book.  It should be noted though 
> that I am not an expert on copyright law so I could be entirely wrong 
> on this but even though common sense and copyright law almost never go 
> together it's just common sense that this would be the way it is. 

The big problem with copyright notices is that they don't mean 
anything.  For the US since 1989 copyright subsists whether or not there 
is a notice.  IMDB pages are copyright only to the extent that they are 
copyrightable.  They have a clear copyright in the general presentation 
of a page, the information itself is not coyrightable, and the copyright 
on the commentary or reviews is owned by whoever wrote it.  If you want 
permission to use a commentary you need to ask that individual.

Ec