[WikiEN-l] I will be leaving the project

Tue Jun 21 17:56:16 UTC 2005

Theresa Knott wrote:

>>As has been pointed out on the relevant talk page, having written
>>something (if we choose to believe an unidentified pseudonymous user) is
>>not necessarily sufficient to establish ownership.  CoolCat claimed that
>>text was prepared for a large offline (i.e. print) distribution.  We
>>have no way of knowing if that was work-for-hire, for example.
>>    
>>
>True. We have no way of knowing that anything that anyone writes for
>wikipedia really belongs to them. All we can do is assume that they
>are telling the truth when they claim it's thier own work.
>
If I were minded to submit copyvio material, I would not cut and paste 
from another website.  I could use OCR then cut and paste from that.  Or 
I could do my own translation of a copyright protected work.  What 
online searches will reveal will only be a small part of copyvios.

>>When it comes to copyright problems, all one has to do is anonymously
>>claim "I wrote it" when it is found to have been published earier
>>elsewhere?  That can't be right.
>>    
>>
>This sort of thing could easily be sorted out though. We could contact
>the publishers directly "Do you give permission for this material to
>be on Wikipedia?"
>
That's assuming that the publisher owns the copyright.  If it's from an 
unsigned article that's probably so as a work-for-hire.  A signed 
article is a different matter.  We should presume that that author has 
the right to use what he wrote in any manner that he sees fit. If he has 
some restrictive licensing arrangement with the publisher he may be in 
breech of contract, but we are in no position to make that judgement.

Ec