[Wikipedia-l] Copyright query

Tue Nov 26 00:41:03 UTC 2002

Oliver Pereira wrote:

>I have a query about copyright, although not directly related to the Bryce
>Harrington thing. If an article is in breach of copyright, and someone
>else replaces the text with original material, the copyrighted material is
>still publically available on the Wikipedia to anyone who knows about the
>revision history page. Doesn't this mean that there is still a breach of
>copyright here? And if so, doesn't the entire article (along with its
>history) have to be deleted, and not just rewritten?
>
>I think I may have edited some articles that *previously* contained
>copyrighted material, and now I'm wondering if these edits actually need
>to be deleted, which would be annoying...
>
I think we should be all right as long as the article history pages are 
not available to search engines.  Not even Wikipedia's own search 
feature can  illustrate these old versions.  That technique is also 
worthwhile in that if a search engine continued to produce a randomly 
selected version from the history page, the value of material on 
Wikipedia would be considerably less reliable than it is now.  As things 
stand, nothing in the current version of an article suggests that a 
copyright violation was removed.  If we apply the fair use rules to the 
material we may find that even if something is not fair use on the 
article, it could become fair use on the history back pages.  The first 
and the fourth factors will notably be different.  

     1. Putting it on the history page will be transformative in that
    the intent is no longer a matter of making it easily available to
    the general public, and it will have acquired a kind of
    meta-existence of interest only to those who are looking for
    possible sources of future copyright violations.  Having a data base
    of these incidents will help to identify others in the future.

     4. The likelyhood of the copyright holder being damaged by having
    this material in our archives is very low.  At least in theory, the
    purpose of editing is to create versions that are progressively more
    reliable than the previous ones.  If the user even cares to go
    through old versions with the aim of inappropriately using material
    that is copyrighted, he is still faced with the question of whether
    what he has found is an accurate and reliable quote.  That's a
    daunting task for someone who is looking for a quick fix for his
    college essay - thus it is highly unlikely that what is found on our
    history pages will have any kind of impact on the market for the
    original work.

My comments are written with textual material in mind.  We have no need 
to keep violating pictures.

Eclecticology