Avoid copyright paranoia

A trend I am observing on Wikipedia is excessive paranoia about copyright infringements. While a certain amount of preventive action is certainly necessary, I strongly oppose simply deleting an entry for "presumed" copyright violations.

Examples:

• An entry which contains a few copied phrases from individual websites or other sources. Quotation, even without attribution, is specifically allowed in international copyright law, and single sentences are generally not protectable.
• A digitized picture that may be copied from elsewhere, but has in fact been created hundreds of years ago. Sometimes, the companies who have digitized these pictures claim copyright on them, but I find such claims highly dubious.
• Screenshots of free software applications, and small illustrative screenshots. It should generally be no problem if a screenshot is copied from the official product page.
• There is not another way to obtain information about a certain product or news. In this case, one only can obtain the information from the official website, for faithful (trustworthy) data.

These are cases where I would generally not delete the entry unless the alleged copyright holder complains. Given Wikipedia's potential liability, after a complaint, immediate action may be necessary, although later correction is possible. But it is not Wikipedians' job to excessively "police" content for copyright infringements, especially when such may not even exist.

In general, when in doubt, do not delete. When "fairly certain", ask the author first in /Talk. The notion of "intellectual property" is dubious at best, and Wikipedia should not support it beyond the limits given by law. Personally, I will restore any entries which I do not see as copyright infr ingements, and I encourage you to do the same.

-- w:Eloquence

There's no "trend": we've always been "paranoid" about copyright infringement, and I like it that way, personally! :-)

Being paranoid over something is hardly ever good, and it is not good in this case. Fair Use currently exists, and until it *is* finally destroyed I suggest we make full use of the rights we have under it.

Worst case senerio: A copyright holder says we are going beyond the bounds of fair use, and then we review it and decide to fight it or take it down. To deny the benefits of the additional information and contributions fair use allows because of a mere possibility of being asked to remove it later is asinine.--ShaunMacPherson 08:52, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Copyright infringements put Wikipedia's owners and the project itself at some risk. That's why we care. What if, in a few years, a dozen different websites and paper encyclopedia publishers had editions of Wikipedia--and all of them had copies of some copyrighted article. What if the copyright holder wanted to make a bunch of money on the case? Basically, we want to avoid even having to deal with that, even if it could be dealt with amicably.

You might not realize it, but copyright infringment was a regular, if not significant, problem in the months before you arrived. On a fairly regular basis--a few times a week, perhaps--someone would simply copy large amounts of copyrighted text into Wikipedia. We'd catch it and remove it. I think this doesn't happen quite as often anymore, for whatever reason (maybe we aren't catching it enough :-( ).

I hope you realize that fair use is something very different and a part from copyright infringement. Copying whole articles is a no-no, using pictures, quotations, and a whole list of other things is permitted. It is 'paranoia' when we do not avail ourselves of the fair use rights we have out of irrational fear. --ShaunMacPherson 08:52, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Now, if your main point is that we should always ask someone first before removing an article, I would counter that this is both a matter of context and a matter of taste, not something on which we need a strict policy. For instance, if I see that so-and-so has uploaded an article from a webpage that has a clear copyright notice on it, and it's clear that so-and-so is not the author of that text, I feel no regrets about simply deleting the text from Wikipedia. Others might follow other policies. Generally, I feel that there is enough abundance of content for Wikipedia that it is probably better to err on the side of deleting. If it is pretty clear that we are violating someone's copyright by having their cont ent on Wikipedia, delete the text--but explain on the /Talk page, always, in any case! If it's not so clear, but it does appear to be a copyright violation, then ask on the /Talk page; if no reply, delete. Those are my rules of thumb.

Finally, Wiki pedia does not have an official policy about the propriety of the institution of intellectual property. We should not attempt to advocate a policy whereby we try to impose on other Wikipedians the view that intellectual property is wrong. So, if the dec ision to delete or not to delete comes down to whether one respects intellectual property (I can't imagine, but just suppose), then kindly allow those of us who might happen to believe that there should be such a thing as intellectual property to act according to our own principles. --Larry_Sanger

Personally, I highly doubt the value of intellectual property law. However, I remove all clear copyright violations with extreme prejudice. If Wikipedia content were to stay solely on the wiki, I would happily support a "wait for the challenge" policy, since it is trivial to add and remove content in this medium. However, Wikipedia will probably be distributed in other forms (multimedia CD, el-cheapo paperback edition, etc) and we cou ld get in a whole heap of trouble if copyrighted material slips into those. We need to catch it as soon as we can, so that those good guys at w:Bomis aren't bled dry in legal battles. --STG

Wholesale copying should be discouraged, but there won't be any harmful consequences for Wikipedia if action is only taken in response to complaint. In other words, if individuals want to be vigilant, that's fine, but there's no need to encourage people to be so. --The Cunctator

1) Trend: Yes, maybe you're right, Larry -- I noticed that the removal of "violations" seemed to happen in "bursts" at least, perhaps because certain individuals are especially motivated to go after presumed violators.

2) You always have to live with th e risk of a lawsuit that has no merit. For example, what if an entry about Shell Oil contains information about their murderous practices in Nigeria that Shell Oil doesn't like? Should we remove it preventively to avoid a lawsuit from Shell Oil, which cou ld get quite expensive? What if a company interprets a Wikipedia title as a trademark violation because our entry ranks higher in the search engine than theirs (such cases already exist)? Should we preventively move all company names to subpages? If you w ant to be safe from the risk of a lawsuit, running an encyclopedia which anyone can edit is probably not such a good idea ;-)

More generally speaking, while we can find evidence that an entry is copied from somewhere else, we can never say with ce rtainty that it is not. If this general uncertainty is just as big as the "certainty" that a certain entry violates copyright, or other laws, then the entry should not be deleted, because consequently this would mean that everything except what you have written yourself needs to be deleted.

I agree with you that people should be able to make decisions on the basis of their beliefs about intellectual property -- what I wrote is only a police recommendation that nobody has to heed. Unfortunately, th at is not true for the edit notice that I am currently seeing below my textarea, which in bold upper case letters states:

DO NOT USE COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!

As is, this statement and the preceding one disallows even quotes from copyri ghted material, i.e. it is more restrictive than actual law. Also, it may be not clear what "USE" means in this context. What if I take an entry from an encyclopedia and extract some meaningful information from it for an entry, perhaps only slightly rewor ding it? Usually, this is completely legal, as copyright only protects form, not content.

Unlike other texts, this is not a text that I can edit, and it is clearly a recommendation from the makers of Wikipedia, so it is Wikipedia/Bomis that is not allowing people who do not believe in intellectual property to act according to their beliefs. Not that I am criticizing that, but it's the exact opposite of your last sentence. I run a few websites myself and of course do not allow people to post copyrighted content either. However, in the context of Wikipedia, it may make more sense to link to an article that explains several standards of inappropriate content, i.e. a "lenient" and more "restrictive" standard, and lets users choose which one to use when posting or deleting content. This article could serve as a stub for the "lenient" policy.

Which would not allow posting copyrighted works verbatim, either, of course, but recommend different behavior for different rules of "certainty". -- w:Eloquence

I agree that the statement is a bit harsh, but I think it's pretty clear (from earlier discussions of the topic and more detailed statements on policy pages) that actual policy of Wikipedia is simply to comply with the law. If the statement is more restrictive than that, consider it an error on the side of caution. --Lee Daniel Crocker

I think another concern you should have is theft of Wikipedia copyright. Due to the nature of the articles on Wikipedia--ver y general and generic prose written to avoid idiosyncracies specific to Wikipedia--and due to MeatBall:KeptPages' forgive and forget policy, it's possible for someone to take a copy of a page today, wait some mo nths, run the system maintenance (or wait for someone at Bomis to do this even though this rarely happens), claim original copyright, and then sue Wikipedia for "stealing" the material.

The alternative is to keep every version, every flamewar, every mistake, and every liability. That is, if someone libels today, and you version everything, that libel will be recorded forever. Then you get into deleting individual versions, and that's another major problem. Who has the power to do this? Do you trust the administrators? I don't trust myself which is why MeatBall:PageDeletion is not an administrator action, but a communal one. I don't have answers to this problem, unfortunately, but maybe someone else can think of one. Whatever you do, avoid Cliff's old MeatBall:KeptVersions idea. The key to scalability is MeatBall:ForgiveAndForget. -- SunirShah

I think re al deletions will be rare, and affect only empty pages with stupid titles or the like. Otherwise, the very script that is generating this page keeps all article versions. Of course, being SQL-based, a database dump can be easily made before removing very old versions. --Magnus Manske

Urg, that "wait till the old version is gone and claim copyright theft" bit is nasty... and entirely possible. That's something we need to deal with. --w:Stephen Gilbert

One soultion is to have Wikipedia released once every year, or every two years, in a hard form (i.e. CD) so it is preserved forever and can be used to verify bogus claims.

Alternatively, Web Archive should be allowed to archive the site. It appears it is currently blocked via 'robots.txt'.

As an additional bonus, the sale of CDs could fund Wikipedia as well as allow people (millions of people) without internet have access to the encyclopdia. --ShaunMacPherson 09:04, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I'm not exactly sure what the "KeptVersions" idea is; it seems to be frozen pages or somesuch. I don't think it's a good idea either.

However, the ForgiveAndForget idea is a point I largely disagree with Sunir on, while I agree with most of his/MeatBall's concepts. At least for me, the usefulness of a full revision history of Wikipedia entries drastically outweighs the negative consequences. I believe in forgiveness, but I'm not sure I see the benefit in forgetting. Already it's been a source of annoyance that on the main site the revision history only goes back about a month--I can't remember what changes/additions I made. I like to be able to pick up on entries right where I left off, be it an hour or two months, and a complete revision history helps. Also, sometimes earlier versions of entries take an alternate (but not inferior) approach to the subject, the coexistence of all the early versions create a more comprehensive entry than the fixed page itself. I'm a ForgiveAndRemember fan. --The Cunctator

Would y ou want all your disputes with Larry remembered and reiterated to you monthly for the next several years? As wikis always exist in the Wiki:WikiNow, flame wars are often continuously reignited unless their context is allow ed to be removed. Full version history prevents this.

By the way, it shouldn't surprise you that ahimsa teaches forgive and forget. If you believe in WikipediAhimsa, you believe in building forgive and forget into the architecture of Wikipedia. -- S unirShah

<< Copyright infringements put Wikipedia's owners and the project itself at some risk. That's why we care. What if, in a few years, a dozen different websites and paper encyclopedia publishers had editions of Wikipedia--and all of them ha d copies of some copyrighted article. What if the copyright holder wanted to make a bunch of money on the case? Basically, we want to avoid even having to deal with that, even if it could be dealt with amicably.>>

This "floodgates of litigation" argume nt is extremely fallacious. To wit, only the most litigious of individuals would prosecute an unwitting infringement of copyright, as an affirmative defense of "innocent infringement" would defeat any claim of damages. Moreover, it is incumbent upo n anyone who uses Wikipedia content to make a reasonable review of that content, and (by necessity) that review would include a competent investigation into potential infringement of copyrights. This is the same standard which Wikipedia should impose upo n itself.

As I see it, the primary justification for paranoia about copyright infringement should not be concerns of legal liability; it should be quality control. The only person who *might* be held accountable for copyright infringement is someone who intentionally steals the work of others and/or refuses to remedy clear cases of infringement by others.

<< I think another concern you should have is theft of Wikipedia copyright.>>

Assuming that Wikipedia spends 30ドル to register its copyrighted mater ial every three months (as most publishers of periodic materials do), this is not a valid concern.--NetEsq

"Wikipedia" is not yet an entity capable of claiming or owning copyrights at the moment, but we're working on it. When the paperw ork is done, we will then assert collection copyrights (though individual contributions will remain with authors as they are now, licensed to us under the GFDL). But that's not my concern at all. I am an IP skeptic as well, but as such I tend to scrupulously follow existing law for the sake of personal credibility--i.e., so I can't be accused of opposing IP law just so I can satisfy my own desires to use copyrighted material). But even so, I agree that some people here are overly paranoid. Obvious violations can certainly be deleted; especially since they can be recovered if we make a big mistake. But otherwise, I agree that asking the question first is OK--we have plenty of means to do that now. --Lee Daniel Crocker

An alternative viewpoint: Trying to keep Wikipedia relatively clear of copyright violations isn't something I try to do out of fear of legal action - it's something I do for quality control. I try to replace fair use photos with GFDL photos fo r the same reasons I try to replace misspellings with correct spellings. MyRedDice

I'm really saddened to see this article. The fuzzy thinking -- "We won't get caught, it's not that big a deal" -- is sloppy and unprofessional. Or, unamateur, to be more specific.

Making an Open Content work is an effort intrinsically connected to copyright and copyright law. Whatever our beliefs regarding Open Content -- for, against, indifferent -- making a quality Open Content work is Wikipedia's stated goal.

If we make a piece of work rife with copyright violations, we will not only have failed in our own effort. We will have hurt the idea of Open Content in general. It will be perfect ammunition for those who detract from the idea: "See? I told you they couldn't do it! They had to steal all these images, texts, etc. from copyrighted work!" What will we say then? "We didn't think we'd get caught"? "Nobody's sued us yet"? "Intellectual property is dumb"?

We _can_ do th is the right way, and trying to finesse copyright law in order to do it is only going to bite us in the end. When in doubt, leave it out. There's no single picture of Eminem or tasty bit of email jokery that's worth jeopardizing the integrity of Wik ipedia.

Let's be paranoid because we're proud of what we do, not because we're afraid of any punishment. -- NotYetAUser:EvanProdromou

Open content is not an end in itself. It is a means to provide free information. If there was no "intellectual pr operty" law, much of our work would be redundant. Where existing laws, or reasonable interpretations thereof, allow us to use existing materials, not only should we do so in our own interest, we should also do so to defend the rights of others. For exampl e, if Wikipedia decides that fair use of quotations or images is entirely unacceptable, this sets a precedent for others to point to in order to reason that said legal exceptions to copyright law are indeed unnecessary. Similarly, if we decide that ph otos of 15th century art are copyrighted and should not be used, this sets a precedent for those who seek to pirate public domain art to point to and say "Look, Wikipedia respects our copyright. They can build an encyclopedia without having to steal our i ntelectual property. So we're going to prevent you from copying our repro of Van Gogh as well."

Paranoia is bad because it supports the existing intellectual property regime in all its perverted variants. Certainly we should not endorse a laissez-faire attitude vis-a-vis copyright violations; however, we should be liberal in our interpretations of what we are allowed to do, and certainly not take any and every copyright claim at face value. Our projects provide a framework and reference for others who will ask themselves similar questions, and we should not contribute to further tightening the noose that copyright has become. --Eloquence 03:29 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The point of Wikipedia is not to smash the shackles of intellectual property law, or to violate copyright law willy-nilly as some form of civil disobedience. It's not our charter, and it's not a universal value.

w/r/t open content: absolutely disagree. It is the stated goal of Wikipedia, before any other, to be free and open content. "Our goal with Wikipedia is to create a free encyclopedia." Before it's supposed to be good, or useful, or even an encyclopedia, it's supposed to be free.

As far as someone else's false claims to monopoly on public domain works, hey, that's not our problem. Blank those people. I say, err on the side of caution, but don't err on the side of irrationality. -- 67.69.200.163 06:02 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

So paranoia is rational?

If can't quote every thing, democracy violate I think. If leave possibility to easily trace origin of quoted material, can quote everything without paranoia I think. -- 213.252.200.100 20:13 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

To clarify 1(?) above. Some individual sentences can be copyrighted, and have been upheld in courts. A primary example of this is Ashleigh Brilliant's stuff, he uses copyright as a gotcha and profit driver. However he does get away with it because the sentences are almost purely expressive. Facts (mostly) can't be copyrighted. So if you cut something purely to the bone; time, date, place, well-chosen words to describe action, you can be fine. This is of course under attack by complation databases, etc. And the biggest thing that we have to watch out for is grabbing lists. Traditionally such things have been salted with false information to prove that someone has grabbed information from your lists. This has included false articles in encyclopedias. No-one would normally look up something that doesn't exists, but it does lead to interesting problems for people who like to browse for their information.
~ender 2003年09月20日 08:14:MST

I would like to know what facts can be copyrighted. Are these imaginary facts? Any real facts would seem to fall into Title 17 USC § 102(b). Also remember that fair use is specifically stated in § 106 not to be infringement so if something does fail into fair use (not always the easiest thing to determine) it is not infringement. Alex756 05:01, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC)

A plea for clear copyrights

Wikipedia has done an amazing job so far. There are thousands of excellent articles, and many, many more in the making. Its a wonderful resource, and it has basically been created in a free and open matter.

I have seen a lot of discussion about copyright, specifically the issues arising from using other people's copyrighted work on Wikipedia. While this is a great thing when the other work is public domain or GFDL compatible, it is, in my opinion, a very problematic issue otherwise.

People have argued that using an image as fair use is acceptable. While it may very well be legally OK to put in image into Wikipedia claiming fair use, I feel that doing so makes Wikipedia a less valuable resource. Now before I can use an image, I have to search around on the page, and its talk page, to make sure it is actually GFDL'ed. Even if it doesn't say "Image x not GFDL, used under fair use exception", it may still be. (I think. Correct me if I'm wrong. I feel *everything* that's not GFDL should be explicitly tagged as such. If it is, great.)

Its not enough to say "Wikipedia is an educational and non-profit organization, so we can use these images/texts/etc". As many others have pointed out, Wikipedia is under the GFDL, and there is nothing that prohibits for-profit, or non-educational, use in that license. So, IMO, anything in Wikipedia should be under the GFDL.

What about the images that are only available in non-GFDL form, such as some famous photographs? My suggestion is that in those cases, we should make a link to sites which have those photos (or other resources). We could link to archive.org's Wayback Machine as a backup in case the original site goes down.

As Wikipedia becomes more and more popular, this is becoming a bigger issue. If there was one lawsuit against Wikipedia, e.g. for some images posted w/o permission, we would get a bunch of negative publicity. I know this is an unlikely scenario, but think about this issue. Wikipedia should be the "encyclopedia-on-the-hill", in the glass house, setting the example of good-copyright-citizenship. Otherwise, any attempt to prevent illegal use of Wikipedia content would seem rather out of place.

Waiving our fair use rights is the first step before they taken away for good. I think fair use should be actively *encouraged*, and it is a waste of your time, and is damaging for those who fight for fair use, lesses the value of the article to take away contributing content, to delete peoples' contributed images that are legally permitted by fair use.--ShaunMacPherson 09:18, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I am sorry if I came off harshly in this "plea"; I realize the vast majority of content on Wikipedia is completely legal. I would like to keep that, and ensure that non-free content doesn't leak into it somehow. I would rather see a thousand new entries on the Requested Images page than one image in Wikipedia that shouldn't be here. (And yes, in a few weeks, I'll be doing my best to fill some of those requests.) Comments appreciated. Luke Stodola 24 January 2004

While it's not impossible to sue the Wikipedia, the reaction if it happened would be a small version of the SCO mess for any company doing it. There's merit in making full use of the copyright law in each jurisdiction, provided we make it easy to get whatever subset is required for a particular publication. We don't yet do that but we are heading that way. Agree about the notice for the image at the place it is used (in the article). That's the way to maximise hte wiki tendency to rework stubs and get it really working hard on replacing images with the most free version possible. Jamesday 21:56, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)

We seem to have real copyright paranoia regarding fair use outside the US. We really need help with this. Secretlondon 21:16, 5 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Agreed. Yes, being aware of non-US issues matters, particularly the way even a restrictive license can be easier to use than fair use in some jurisdictions, but some discussions are going much further than is necessary. Making it easy to filter will do the job without unduly infringing the right to make fair use of works in US publications. Written as a UK citizen, in the US for many years but leaving the US to no fair use land within months. Jamesday 21:56, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)

There seems to be an argument that has been overlooked (or perhaps I overlooked the argument on this web page): every copyright owner who sees his work used here without his consent, can be bold and remove the work in question. This fact should take the biggest sting out of any damages claim. After all, what damages can you claim if you did not remove the infringing content yourself?--23/4/2004

Unfortunately, (s)he can claim that the text is not deleted at all, but rather slightly hidden in the Page history. I have no idea about the legal aspects of this, but I believe it should be considered. Secondly, if the problem is with a picture, you've got to be a admin to delete it. From an article, sure, you could remove the link to it but I'm afraid that's not enough. On the other hand, we could add a link at the bottom of every page: "What to do if content of this page is a copyright infringement" with an suitable "to do-list" for copyright owners. Personally, I could be accused of copyright paranoia, but I do believe that such a link could protect us pretty well... (Maybe it is time to use our own advise and get professional legal advise?:) \Mikez 07:38, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

"Secondly, if the problem is with a picture, you've got to be a admin to delete it." - Actually you can upload a different picture with the same name, but that's not the easiest thing to do OR obvious. Given that this is possible, it should be possible to delete pictures. Unless we fear there's too much of a chance of abuse. -User:SPUI

Wikipedians should also beware that while an image might be out of copyright, the library which provides you with the copy will often charge a hefty fee to allow it to be placed on a web-site or any other publication. This can mean that it might not be econonomically viable to make use of an image. I think that having an artist redraw it might be legal. Many web library web sites have images with a very low resolution so they cannot be reproduced, only read on screen. To get a usable copy costs, I am afraid. Apwoolrich 14:42, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

There's a discussion in progress at Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Beasts_of_England regarding an article which consists—correction, formerly consisted—mostly of the complete seven stanzas of Beasts of England, from Animal Farm. I believe there is at least a question about the copyright status. And I believe that whomever inserted the line in the article saying:

Note: Lyrics are public domain, under 50-year death expiration. see copyrights

is oversimplifying. I'd appreciate it knowledgeable commentary about this in the VfD discussion, near the bottom (where I've put a longish comment). My guess is that maybe it's OK, but not because it's in the public domain. I don't believe it is in the public domain in the U.S. My reason for believing this is that the UPenn Online Books Page says it isn't. I don't say we can't use it. I say if we can we need a clear rationale, and "50-year death expiration" ain't it. Dpbsmith 20:34, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Are Wikipedias in all languages subject to American copyright law? There's currently a discussion at Polish Wikipedia where it is claimed to be subject to Polish law, despite being stored on American servers, and thus it shouldn't use fair use images. Ausir 20:20, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

At the German Wikipedia it has been decided to go according to german law, as if you take a look at court rulings the latest rulings international are done regarding "who is the target group" not "where is it stored" --EricPoehlsen to lazy to login in the cyber so as 61.1.43.116 14:24, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

IANAL. The Australian Gutnick libel case seems to indicate that Australian law, in relation to published items, extends to electronic material which any Australian could read. Copyright Act (1968) Cwth might have an extensive hold over the internet. Opinions? Fifelfoo 05:50, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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