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Posted by: Ottava

I have posted this before, but I think it is necessary. Many people say that it is only plagiarism or original research, and that "summaries" are plagiarism. I will put forth my rule of thumb that ensures that both plagiarism and original research can't happen, then explain why people don't follow this.

When I talk to people, I tell them that, at the minimum, to summarize 10 sentences from a source with one sentence (when not directly quoting). Realistically, 1 sentence in an article should be a summary of 1 page in a book.

By summarizing that much into one sentence, you are forced to condense the language and ideas. You get rid of the flak, get more to the point, and it shows that your topic is more notable.

But why don't people do this? Many reasons:

1. Notability - most articles are on non-notable topics. People desperate to promote their favorite thing want to make a large article even though there are few sources. So, they take one sentence to make one sentence. Such was the case of Samus Aran, which ended up lifting passages from video game sites on game mechanics. Such clearly were not needed. However, there were no "books" on the topic so the writer wanting to make the topic seem great had to scrap the bottom of the barrel.

2. Laziness - some people don't want to go to a library, find books, and do research. Instead, they click google, type in some stuff, and start pulling stuff over. Since it takes work to summarize, they just don't. This was what Rlevse did and what Carcharoth would do.

3. Uncreative - summarizing takes thought and some people just can't think.

4. Trying to "win" - contests like WikiCup pit obviously skilled writers versus those that aren't. So, what happens when someone wants to win and lacks any ability? They cheat. It happens in any sport. Does that make the sport wrong? No. But sports should ban such people. Roger Davies and Carcharoth both were taking material from sites or books whole sale to produce pages faster for various contests. After all, contests give points and points are how you win the Wiki.



By summarizing a lot into a little, that isn't plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking someone else's words and saying they are your own. Original Research is making claims without any credible source to back them up, thus making you the authority (and no, you aren't an authority).

Posted by: jayvdb

This is a good rule of thumb. In regards to 'winning' and laziness, I'm guessing that DYK is a big cause of this. Article creators want to pad out the article with as much detail as possible in order to qualify for DYK. I know I have done it.

Why are you mentioning Carcharoth here, based on what he 'would do'? That sounds very odd. He isn't the best distiller of information that I've come across but he isn't lazy wrt doing research.

Posted by: Milton Roe

I hate to say this, but you're right.

I should add that the problem is that that WP officially isn't just out to summarize and compress the world's knowledge, but to completely digest and re-present it in full form, hyperlinked, details and all. According officially to Jimbo. So, they have an intractable problem.

Even compression is an intractable problem, since, as you point out, it can't be done without original thought and synthesis. Try getting a machine to do it.

Posted by: Ottava

I wouldn't say original "thought" but more of creativity. Creativity is the ability to take what is already present and rework it. It is the use of the imaginative function (ala Hume) combined with deductive reasoning to fill in the blanks. In this case, taking what is big and shrinking it to what is small. Think of fractals, where the tiny aspects are the same as the large but much smaller.

There is definitely an end result based on a previous matter. Does it look different? Sure. Is there some resemblance to the original? Yah. I prefer to think of Dr Evil and Mini Me.

As for what Jimbo wants, feh, who cares. This is just what I want. Me me me me me.




Jayvdb



Go back to January/February where it was revealed that Carcharoth's submissions for the WikiCup had many instances of plagiarism. He then went about cleaning them up.

Posted by: Malleus

So your premise is that because a machine can't do something then it's impossible? How bizarre.

Posted by: Milton Roe

No, I'm merely pointing out that abstracting a work and writing a good summary is a fairly high-level mental task, requiring sentience and sapience. We have computers that can drive a car or play expert chess, but we're not even close to having a computer that can read a book and spit out a book report, let alone a good Cliff's Notes. The basic reason is that it requires some creativity and originality to abstract meaning, express it, and order it according to importance. It requires synthesis of the sort that is forbidden by WP:SYNTH.

As has been pointed out, only a small fraction of people can do this. It's something that not even good fraction of literate people can do.

No, I'm not selling it as the ultimate level of intellect. It's not as hard as being able to (say) read a science journal article and be able to write a decent article abstract or review paper (and yet we'd like Wikipedians who can do that, too!). And this, in turn, is not as hard as actually doing the creative thinking that goes into writing the primary publishable work (whether novel or science paper).

So don't misunderstand me. I don't expect computers to do it for a long, long time. And even when they can, the novelists, engineers, and scientists still won't be out of jobs. Legal secretaries-- maybe.

Posted by: Ottava

SYNTH isn't summarizing one source and doesn't exist until you use two sources. In essence, WP:SYNTH bans a situation where you have source A saying "Miltons like chocolate" and source B saying "liberals like chocolate" then adding to John Milton's biography "Milton was a liberal because he liked chocolate" and then adding both articles as the ref.

Sure, the conclusion -may- be true, but it probably isn't and if it was you would only need one source to say it. Multiple refs should only be used to verify a claim that is equally present in them all and to ensure that controversial material is shown to be widely reported.

That doesn't always happen.

Posted by: Collect

Nope. Plagiarism is taking another person's original idea and passing it off as your own. Rewording an original idea is still plagiarism if one does not attribute the idea.

Facts, dry facts, are another matter. The simpler the wording the better. Facts can not be "original ideas" and US courts have held that facts can not even be copyrighted.

Wikipedia is in the conundrum now of saying that exact quotes are bad, and paraphrases are bad (as the original source rarely coincides with the paraphrase). The conumdrum is self-made.

WP should admit that facts, qua facts, are not plagiarism, and that "original idea" copying is plagiarism, even if paraphrased or reworded.

This would even make the whole muddy business comprehensible to outsiders.

Posted by: lilburne

BTWI love what they did on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate:





As Mr Punch would say "That's the way to do it, that's the way to do it."

Posted by: jayvdb

Facts are facts. Embellish them with prose and they are not just facts anymore - they become a stream of facts, ordered in a chosen way to (hopefully) be easy to follow and comprehend.
When someone adds raw facts to Wikipedia, there is very little need to use other peoples sentence structures.

A similar 'problem' applies to free software, whose creators mostly believe that algorithms shouldn't be able to be patented, and often say that algorithms can only be written one way. Rather than ignore copyright concerns in these cases, their founders http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Reading-Non_002dFree-Code.html that creators went out of their way to end up with unmistakably different, and consequently free, source code. GNU took a lot longer than Wikipedia, but their product isn't riddled with copyright problems in their archives.

Quotes and Paraphrasing are useful tools; I don't know why you think they are bad.
It is possible to distill the 'available knowledge' without ending up lost in WP:OR/WP:SYNTH territory.

Posted by: SB_Johnny

Not that I disagree with what you're saying here, but George W Bush, Republicans, Lincoln, Log Cabins, and homosexuality (among other Ottavalogical leaps) come to mind when you in particular say it.

Posted by: Ottava

No.

That is intellectual theft.

Plagiarism is not taking another's ideas. It is taking another's words. You can have words for an unoriginal idea. After all, history books are about things that aren't original.




Facts can't, but you can't just list facts. Listing facts would be something like:

* Born -
* Parents -

etc.

Those are called "infoboxes". They don't make good articles. Britannica is copyrighted and if we started copying and pasting their "facts", we would be penalized.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Yes, lovely example. Now, chocolate becomes more and more colored with the issue of European misuses of other human beings. Sources for all of it. And who are you to say that the emphasis is not proper? Is this not part of the righteous history of chocolate?

There are a million gradations here, also. Why write "wage laborers" instead of "employees"? And is the proper ordering "wage laborers and enslaved peoples" or "enslaved peoples and wage laborers"? Is a ratio of one to the other needed or helpful? If it is historically mostly one over the other (and you found the cites), should the "mostly" go in? How about if we put "enslaved peoples living under high-mortality conditions [ref]."? By the time the writers are done, it's an article from the leftist perspective that should be titled blood chocolate, but of course isn't.

Posted by: lilburne

Well it is the wikipedians that have removed the "wage laborers and enslaved peoples" and replacing it with "an African workforce to help manage". Probably someone had read Nozick.

Posted by: Abd

It's also plagiarism. For an actual academic definition of plagiarism, see http://www.indiana.edu/~wts/pamphlets/plagiarism.shtml from Indiana University. If Ottava would like to be perceived as an academic, this is a shocking error, a fundamental one, and I'd recommend he fall all over himself to correct it ASAP. He mostly doesn't take my advice, but he might consider it, specially, in this case.
Weird. Several ideas are collapsed here. First of all, very difficult to "penalize" a nonprofit site. A takedown notice would be about the extent of it, it would take egregious and willful copyright violation, provable, to do more than that.

Secondly, every fact in Brittanica, almost without exception, can be found somewhere else. If, however, an article contained fifty facts, and a Wikipedia article, some version, contained the same fifty facts, it is conceivable that copyright violation could be asserted. It is the collection of the facts that can be copyrighted. Maybe. This gets so esoteric that legally it means practically nothing unless someone does it on a large scale from a single source or some other way to make it worth the insane effort to prosecute.

Ottava is dead wrong about "plagiarism," as interpreted in academia, which is where the concern arises. Plagiarism and copyright violation are not the same, though there is a great deal of overlap.

As the pamphlet notes, rewording is not sufficient to avoid plagiarism, it simply makes it more difficult to detect. Plagiarism is defined in the pamphlet as

Rlevse clearly plagiarized, but ... so do many, many editors, probably including many of those applying the tar and feathers.

As to "copyvio," fair use probably covers almost all copying on Wikipedia that would otherwise be copyvio. Wikipedia is largely immune to prosecution for this, either as a civil or criminal matter, if it promptly responds to a take-down notice.

In other words, for the community to spend substantial effort trying to enforce complete freedom from copyvio is probably a huge waste of time. Bad idea. There is a potential down side, as well. If a site really does take responsibility for content, as an organization, it is no longer merely an ISP, and not protected as ISPs are protected.

I know of an on-line publication that posts copies of copyrighted articles, for the purpose of criticism and review. They have been doing this for years, but they are non-profit. Sometimes the articles disappear, with only a link to the original publisher present (who is always credited in any case, and "fair use" is explicitly asserted.) My guess is that they simply take the material down if the publisher objects.

I've seen people assert that this is some kind of scuzzy behavior, but

*It's legal.
*It does serve the public.

Wikipedia, in theory, decided not to go this route, but, in one way, went way overboard, and in another, completely ignored plagiarism of the paraphrase kind, that is still potentially copyright violation.

It went way overboard in using copyright violation, for one example, to impugn and impeach and blacklist web sites that may have had occasional "violations" of the "no explicit permission from the publisher" kind, this was one of the excuses used for the blacklisting of lenr-canr.org, though no actual proven case of true violation was asserted, merely assumptions.

Example of that: the site puts up nothing without the author actually providing it (the site doesn't scrape content from elsewhere) and giving permission. Legally, this may or may not be enough, i.e., in some cases, the publisher has granted permission to the author to, for example, put up preprints that are identical to the published material, -- except for page formatting and certain other details -- or the publisher may have some special arrangement with an author, and it is practically impossible for the site manager to verify and check this.

I was able to figure out what the web site operator actually does, almost certainly. When the publisher permission is not clear to him, but the author has given permission, he does not badger the author to prove permission, rather he notifies the publisher of the hosting and requests formal permission. He reports that publishers almost never respond at all to these requests. Why should they? They gain nothing at all from wasting time even reading it! If they decide they don't like what the web site is doing, they can easily stop it, and, apparently -- rarely -- they do. It would take them a minute. And so what's crucial for protection is take-down process.

Avoiding all possible copyright violation is useless effort, and where does the labor come from for that?

Of course, the barn door that is left open is that paraphrase is not enough. It is still plagiarism and can still be copyright violation if all that has been done is to shove words around and substitute synonyms, etc., and, as the pamphlet points out, it is likewise still plagiarism. It is not plagiarism if it is attributed and exact quotations are shown as such, typically using quotation marks, but it might still be copyright violation.

Strictly speaking, there is no violation of copyright law if a nonprofit site hosts a "copyvio," which, then, means something that legally must be taken down upon request, or it [i]becomes[/] a violation. A for-profit site can be held to a much higher standard.

Most of what is hosted on Wikipedia, though, would not represent the kind of copyright violation that represents a "loss" for an original publisher. Commons, however, could be an exception, if the image hosted is substantially as useful as the original.... But Wikipedia is still protected as a nonprofit.

Posted by: lilburne

Well it is scuzzy and it isn't legal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.A._Times_v._Free_Republic

Daily kos banned and deleted loads of users content back in 2006 over cut&pasting entire articles.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/1/3/19928/53458

Posted by: lilburne

That is so wrong. Just because one is a non-profit does not give you immunity from copyright sanctions. Lets face it Thomas-Rasset just got hit for $1.5 million. Even if you have legal status as a non-profit organisation you still won't get away with copyright violation.

Posted by: Ottava

Before you act snide, please read what the pamphlet even says:

"# How to Recognize Unacceptable and Acceptable Paraphrases

* An Unacceptable Paraphrase
* An Acceptable Paraphrase
* Another Acceptable Paraphrase"

The problem with that policy is they call it "Plagiarism" when most Universities call it "Academic Dishonesty". Intellectual Theft, Plagiarism, Copyright Infringement, and other problems that Wiki has, along with cheating, all fall under the heading.

By taking it as you took it, you enter into a silly bit of over literalism. An example: "To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit whenever you use". In using Mathematical formulae, this isn't always necessary. I can use a^2+b^2=c^2 without having to have a footnote saying "Pythagoras" behind it.






Non-profits can be sued and fined. Wikipedia has a lot of money and would be destroyed if it was sued for 20 million dollars.



A woman is jailed for stealing 23 songs. It doesn't take much in terms of copyright.



You are confusing paraphrasing with "rewording". "Rewording" is also called "close-paraphrasing" which isn't paraphrasing at all.



You were already severely pwned on this above with reference to the Freeper matter.


Sigh.

Posted by: Abd

This is worth looking at, because, among other things, it shows the shallow understanding of some editors and, in particular, "lilburn," aka Nastytroll (T-C-L-K-R-D) . If it were just this idiot, I wouldn't bother, but I've seen this same argument from other editors. In fact, maybe Nastytroll is really one of them!

"Scuzzy" implies a moral judgment. What's the standard? The behavior described does little or no harm, ordinarily, and the one harmed, if they judge that they are harmed, can stop it immediately with practically no effort. They don't need to spend money, hire a lawyer, all they need to do is send a take-down notice.

There is no criminal offense involved, unless perhaps the claim of "fair use" was totally preposterous and there was intentional harm. Notice the U.S. Copyright Office's http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html I will point out that it notes that "fair use" is complicated. It then gives advice. That advice is not a moral imperative. However, if we look at the standards of fair use, they all protect Wikipedia. It's worth quoting them:
Wikipedia articles almost always do not copy sufficient material to cause factors 3 or 4 to fail. Images in some cases may fail test 4, but notice that low-res images are often allowed at Commons, because these can be adequate for articles (educational purpose) and the market for an image is far more likely to be for the high-res form. The high-res image may be the protected work "as a whole," or close to it.

To be "illegal," an action, by itself, must violate a law, not merely a civil or commercial right (which may be established by law, but the law will specify what are criminal acts and the penalties therefor, and what merely establish legal rights, perhaps for civil recovery. An act with no penalty is not "illegal." If it harms someone, they may have rights under the law to stop the behavior, and if it causes them harm, they may be able to recover damages, but that does not make the act "illegal." It makes it actionable, something quite different.

We have some lawyers who read Wikipedia Review, and I am not a lawyer, and I can get it wrong. On the other hand, I've written briefs or suggested approaches that were used by lawyers in guiding their own research and action, where I happened to have sufficient knowledge of a narrow area. On copyright, I have only some background and a little reading and some understanding of common law. Copyright law changed over the last decades, and copyright is not common-law, it is a creation of statute, it can be utterly arbitrary, which makes it tougher to understand and predict.

Now, about that Free Republic case. From the Wikipedia article:
Ahem. One element in the case against Free Republic is that they did not respond to a cease-and-desist order. Further, note, the full-text articles were published, not merely quotations or excerpts. In addition, the plaintiffs asserted -- and included in the suit -- a business owned by Robinson which advertised on Free Republic, which would benefit from Free Republic traffic. So they were asserting a commercial purpose.

This case makes for bad precedent because it was not adequately defended or appealed. Read the effing article. However, my own opinion is that Free Republic screwed up, royally. Now, how does this relate to Wikipedia or to a nonprofit educational corporation, and that immediately responds to take-down requests?

As to the Daily Kos example asserted, the link is to the site policy, which prohibits the copying of entire articles. It allows "fair use," but provides, as usual, an unclear definition, because "fair use" has no clear definition. That's one of the reasons why, generally, an assertion of fair use is protective if it is not preposterous. The key is how one behaves if the "fair use" defense is challenged, i.e., the copyright owner complains. One can assert that a "fair use" claim was considered reasonable, but once one has refused to take the material down, causing the copyright owner to have to take expensive legal action to protect the owner's rights, the courts will look at the fair use claim with a jaundiced eye.

If the use is actually fair, the copyright owner has no right to order takedown. However, the owner will then have a prima facie case of copyright violation to file, and it could be very expensive to be right.

I'm not aware of any claimed example of "copyvio" as to article text on Wikipedia where the use was not actually "fair." In other words, Wikipedia is triply protected:

*The WMF does not routinely monitor content to insure freedom from copyright violation. This is a community function and is not under the control of the corporation. Nevertheless, the community does look for obvious copyvio, and interprets it very, very conservatively. I'm arguing that the response to Rlevse was a bit hysterical, but ... it may have been fair if Rlevse himself applied strict standards to others.
*The WMF orders takedown upon claim, if I'm correct. They don't argue about it, generally, if there is any apparent basis for the claim. If this got serious, it would go to counsel for review, I'm sure. They do not depend on volunteers for this, I'm sure.
*If nevertheless a case was filed, it would be defensible under fair use as defined above. And this would be so obvious that it's possible the WMF could win attorney's fees due to a frivolous lawsuit. Ask a lawyer about that!

As an additional point, Free Republic was presented with a civil lawsuit. There was no criminal prosecution, as one would presumably have seen if what they did was "illegal."

But some people use "illegal" to mean "could get you sued." It's sloppy. Lots of things can get you sued! The relationship of copyright law to the Free Republic case is that the law established certain rights for the newspapers; and Free Republic injured the newspapers, and managed to trash their own protections by how they conducted themselves.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

This gets at the underlying harm that is sought to be avoided even if it is not accepted everywhere as the actual definition of plagiarism. It cannot be addressed by mechanical fixes such as paraphrasing or "restating." This is an offense of deception that could have been cured with given credit where due.

Posted by: Ottava

Many, many problems in the above. Wikipedia has stolen full pages of other people's material, which is a major violation. Furthermore, fair use based on Supreme Court rulings requires a lack of infringement of the original source to make money - i.e. releasing even one page of the Harry Potter books would do just that.

The low-rest images are only used when there is no possible replacement and they are not, NOT, allowed on Commons.



Yes, it does make it illegal. You have to options - press charges or sue. Most companies prefer to sue but in the case of the woman downloading music she was sent to jail.



I was a Freeper at the time. It was adequately defended. What they were doing was indefensible - full out copying. That is exactly what Wikipedia has done before. What the Freepers did was just like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contributor_copyright_investigations/Banglapedia_(source).



In short, I hope no one tries to follow your advice because you don't know what you are talking about.

Posted by: HRIP7

Facts are facts, and facts are not copyrightable, even if they are only reported in a single source.

If the facts are

"John Doe died of food poisoning in July 2010. He was working on a book titled 'Good Food' at the time of his death."

then it's very hard to report those facts without sounding similar to the source. However, it's neither plagiarism nor a copyright violation.

Posted by: Milton Roe

At what point do ideas pass into common domain and no longer need be attributed? For example, if I speak of artillery shrapnel,* am I required to note credit for the idea in a footnote? Most of my knowledge is not original, but neither can I give you an original source for much of it, either. Originality is the art of concealing your sources.** If you know them.

MR

* Due to Major-General Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842)
** Ben Franklin

Posted by: HRIP7

Ideas are not copyrightable either. Only their creative, original expression is protected by copyright.

Posted by: Abd

Well, he didn't listen. Ottava remains Ottava, impervious to any sort of course-correction, supremely confident in his own superior wisdom. Even with people two or three times his age, with extensive experience, etc., etc. This does not bode well for his future, he will careen from one disaster to another, in his personal, academic, and social relationships, always blaming others.

He will imagine that I'm just wanting to be right, myself, that this is an attack, as he has taken every warning to him that I've seen from anyone.

I've called this the "paranoid mind-set," and it can always invent arguments to justify itself, ignoring the substance, always seeking some flaw in the expression of others, never trying to actually understand.

If we are sane, and we see someone like Ottava, we should be quite worried that this is us. After all, how would we know?

Uh, Ottava, do you imagine that I'd send readers to the pamphlet without having read it?
This is ripped out of context. Ottava is placing this in opposition to my comment "it's also plagiarism," when the pamphlet clearly covers the behavior that Ottava claimed was not plagiarism. This is plagiarism, according to the pamphlet:
The key word here is "credit." "Acceptable paraphrase," among other traits, gives credit to the source. It just doesn't use exact quotation. Ottava is using this to imply that copying "ideas" is not plagiarism. That is a very poor use of a source, the pamphlet, and if he did things like this with articles, he is a danger to the project, one of the worst kinds, under some conditions.
Source for that claim? "Academic dishonesty," I'd think, would be even broader. How about making up sources? Not plagiarism, but certainly dishonest! Not that it is necessarily a reliable source, Academic dishonesty includes plagiarism as a specific type, which is clearly correct.

Now, what about the academic dishonesty involved in beating a dead horse? In pretending that you have the clear "victory" when you have not a leg to stand on? (below, you used "pwned" with respect to the Free Republic case, when that case didn't apply at all. Granted, this may not be, exactly, "academic dishonesty," but rather total incompetence, and the dishonesty is involved would be in pretending academic status and respectability.

And if you do have academic status, Ottava, shame on the institution, or I hope you are paying them instead of the reverse. Still, if you don't become teachable, you would be wasting your money -- or someone else's.
What heading? Copyright infringement is not necessarily "academic dishonesty," so that couldn't be it. Perhaps it is crazy for me to expect what you write to make sense.
Straw man argument. I didn't say that. It's a fragment taken out of context from the pamphlet. And, in fact, it would be a "silly literalism" to deny a general statement because there are exceptions. "Whenever you use" what? By leaving that part out, the application was not specified, making the statement look incomplete. I.e., as if one had said "whenever you use anything that was used by anyone else." Or something silly like that.

Ottava, the short of it: you have, for quite some time, been behaving as a Compleat Idiot.

I thought that this example might be clear enough for you to see, that, "Er, I was wrong about that." Do you know that the ability to be wrong is essential to learning? Do you know that the ability to admit error is essential to functional human relationships?

Do you ever make mistakes, Ottava?
Ottava, you don't know how to write accurately. You mean "successfully sued, winning a judgment of $20 million." Wikipedia would not be destroyed merely because it was sued, and if if, somehow, it screwed up so royally that it suffered a judgment of $20 million, do you know what would happen? Hint: it doesn't involve the project shutting down, unless somehow the lawsuit required that (in which case it would definitely not be about copyright violation.)

You have utterly no foundation or relevant experience in real life on which to base your judgments.

And what does this have to do with copyvio? What action of the WMF would make it liable for a sum like that?

Being nonprofit contributes to the fair use defense, and I documented that above, and, in addition, being a nonprofit corporation. That was the context of my comment about "very difficult to penalize a nonprofit site," which was incompletely expressed, and if you want to ding me for incomplete expression, realize that this would require that I write even heavier tomes.
Ah, the RIAA, which is cutting off its own nose to spite its face. Cite the case, and make the parallel. You didn't provide enough information to find the case. But I did find http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/10/riaa-jury-finds/ She didn't just "steal" 23 songs. In fact, she didn't steal anything. What she did was to make about 1700 files available with Kazaa. It was 24 songs that were specifically proven, that's all. And the RIAA was trying to make a point. And there are other factors that make this not an applicable precedent at all. By the way, http://www.thespacelab.tv/spaceLAB/2010/11November/MusicNews-16-JammieThomas-RassetOwes$1.5%20MillionForCopyrightInfringementToRIAA.htm

If this is the case Ottava had in mind, he was very much mistaken. No jail. This was a civil case, where the standard of proof is only "preponderance of the evidence." This wasn't a criminal matter.

The very use of the word "stealing" for this fries me, because theft is a common-law offense, with ancient roots and heavy and clear moral issues involved, and "copyright violation," i.e., "pirating music," is a creation of statute, statutes which serve, as much as anything else, large corporate interests. Complicated issue, and I'm not pretending that justice is all on one side ... but I do see that people get completely insane about this, perhaps because of the huge volume of propaganda paid for, over the last few years, by those same corporate interests....

For the first time, it became possible to "steal" something without depriving anyone else of anything. Now, if she copied those songs and sold them, bingo! That was a kind of theft, and there may have been actual harm. Was she profiting from the activity? I really should look up the law, it's been some time, and some of these things have shifted over the years.
This pedantic detail is relevant? Close-paraphrasing isn't paraphrasing? Weird language, English, eh?
Indeed, sigh. Enjoy it while you can. Pwned? Ottava, I have well over twenty years of experience on-line, including the W.E.L.L., Usenet, and forums of all kinds. You are a kid who imagines that the little knowledge he has is superior to the extensive knowledge and experience of others, and who stubbornly asserts it, and is completely closed to learning more. You are far more like Krunchlolee than you'd like to admit, you are merely higher-functioning, he is almost completely off the deep end. Or is purely a troll, hard to tell for sure.

Posted by: jayvdb

poppycock.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Don't conflate copyright and plagiarism. Time never cures plagiarism. If you appropriate the ideas of another person without attribution it is plagiarism. This ought to be a serous burden to any encyclopedia. A whole lot of what happens on WP is that someone turns to someone else's summary of a topic, or maybe more than one, cites the underlying references, rework the wording and give no credit to the authors of the summaries. This is plagiarism or something very like it.

If you turned to Franklin or Shrapnel for your source you need to credit them.

Posted by: lilburne

A take down removes the immediate harm and a service provider that does so expediently retains their safe-harbour status. Whether a take down is sufficient for a copyright violation is something the holder will have to decide as to whether they are going to go after the uploader. Minimum charge $750 but may be as high as $150,000 depending on wilfulness per work infringed plus legal fees.

Also 'illegal' is simply contrary to law it isn't some fancy synonym for criminal.

Fair-use is basically what a judge a trial says it is, that said it is fairly limited you may want to take a look at this from Stanford:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html

BTW: The fourth factor is only applied in relation to the other 3 factor. It will sway the fair-use case but it won't turn a marginally unfair use into a fair one, nor will it turn an otherwise fair use into an unfair use.

What will hit WP or at least the editors on copyright is going to be the images. Particularly when they are re-licenced as CC-BY-SA or CC-BY. Don't be mistaken in thinking that small resolution images aren't commercial because they are. Newspaper will use 500px images in stories. Last year a local newspaper wanted to use some bug photos of mine. I pointed them to a flickr set with 1200px images, told them to let me know what they wanted and I'd give them the full rez. There response was that the 1200px images were huge. I've just been sent a children's picture book which used some images at 1/4 page size. They never asked for the full sizes. Same with two University text books that will be coming out next year one on evolution and medical text book with a section on urticating hairs.

A 640px images is perfectly good enough of greeting cards. You can use it to create CD and DVD artwork. There are no end of commercial uses. The only times recently I've been asked for high rez images was when a Catholic Diocese wanted to use the image as a poster, and the Natural History Museum of Venice's use in a multimedia exhibition.

A 3000px image will easily print a 24x30 poster.

Posted by: jayvdb

What bugs me most about the ongoing discussions about EB1911 is that everyone says 'but it is attributed', yet not once is the author of the EB1911 articles mentioned even though the EB1911 included the initials of the author at the end of almost every article, and these were removed when the articles were slurped into WP. Attribution is not merely pointing to where the text can be found - it requires that the author is credited for their work.

Posted by: Abd

No, many, many problems in how Ottava thinks. Conclusions first, arguments and facts later. The underlying conclusion, always assumed: Ottava is right.
"Wikipedia" has done none of this unless it became legally aware and allowed a violation to continue. ("Wikipedia" is not a legal entity. Individual editors are, and the WMF is.) A "full page" may or may not be a "major violation." WTF is a "page" on Wikipedia, anyway? A stub is a "page," but is unlikely to be a major part of a source that suffers injury from the quotation.
From what I've seen, I can't believe a word you say that isn't sourced. I think you just totally misunderstood fair use. [i]One factor[/] in fair use is a lack of commercial motive on the part of the one claiming fair use. As to the other side of this, the motive of the source, that would factor into damages, not infringement, per se.
The low-rest images are only used when there is no possible replacement and they are not, NOT, allowed on Commons.Ottava is correct about Commons, and it's an important point, for those who upload images. Commons is designed for images to be freely shared, that's why fair use images are not allowed there. But they may be used on Wikipedia, hosted there under fair use.
Ottava doesn't understand legal generalities. He's assuming particular circumstances which were not stated, and then contradicting his own imagination. It's one of the pitfalls that paranoid thinkers fall into.
I based my comment on information in the article which I cited. Ottava just writes off the top of his head, and assumes that his own knowledge is complete and balanced. The case was not adequately defended, the defendant substituted other attorneys during the appeal -- as I recall -- and the defendant abandoned defense on a number of critical points, but that was actually the least important part of my comment. This was not an appellate decision that was defended adequately on appeal, it isn't a decent precedent, it is merely well-known among internet habitues, like Ottava, who was certainly interested. However, I don't see that, given the poor response of the defendant to the cease-and-desist order, a better defense would have been worth the effort. This was a very poor case to cite regarding what we've been discussing. It does not bear on it at all. For two major reasons which I stated, and which were ignored. Typical.
What advice? I made some general comments about law and common law. Legal advice would have to do with specific situations.

It is always possible that my knowledge is incomplete or that something I think I know is not a fact, or is obsolete. But I'm not seeing correction coming from anyone who knows the law or the facts, except on one minor point: I did get confused about the difference between Commons and Wikipedia as to "fair use," I'd forgotten about that. This is important for Commons because Commons would not have a fair use defense, since the purpose of Commons is not "educational," per se. It is to provide images for free use; hence Commons must be much more careful than Wikipedia. Or the on-line publication I mentioned.

They are not hosting full papers by my advice! Rather, I believe that they obtained legal advice that they could do this, provided that they promptly took the papers down if asked to do so. Or the editor decided that the value was worth the (small) risk. (There are not large numbers of papers like this hosted, and numbers do count, and the value of what is hosted, i.e., what it would cost to buy it.)

If I were going to do this myself, I'd ask an attorney! A specialist, not just any attorney. And the answer you'll get from such a one sometimes depends on the questions.

(This, by the way, is not lenr-canr.org. They host documents by permission, and if there are any exceptions, they are few; and for Wikipedia, occasional copyvios on a site is not a reason not to link to the site, and I've seen a lot of ignorance about this one, also. It is only linking to *known copyvio* that creates a -- small -- risk. The only case that's been cited on this was a massive attempt to defeat copyright, egregious.)

Posted by: lilburne

No it does not. Wikipedia cannot simple copy whole chunks of stuff that a commercial entity cannot copy, simple because it is a non-profit. Here again is advice to teachers:
http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/intellectualProperty/clasguid.htm

you'll notice that WP) fails on nearly all of those guidelines.

Posted by: HRIP7

You're right there; the one has nothing to do with the other.


You have to distinguish between presenting the same facts and copying a creative expression. Expressions like "food poisoning" are not creative.

You could write,

"Towards the end of his life, Doe worked on a book to be published under the title "Good Food". The book was left uncompleted; Doe died of food poisoning in July 2010.

I don't think that would infringe the source's copyright, but it's still recognisably similar.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Jon

Posted by: Abd

That is a very simple and sober statement of fact. Read the material cited from the Copyright Office. (I'm not familiar with copyright law in other countries than the U.S., but it is this law that applies to Wikipedia.)
What lilburne ignores is that, first of all, nonprofit purpose does contribute to defense. That's plainly obvious. "contributes to defense" does not mean " makes completely permissible and unchallengeable." But that is how this editor has responded, as if that had been said.

Typical Wikipediot problem: unable to think clearly. combined with a straw man argument based on being unable to understand what others have written.

As to the source cited, it is highly permissive, I'm surprised that this would be given as evidence for a tight interpretation of fair use.

Again, if this editor used a source to back a claim in an article, comparable to the source cited above, claiming that it backed up what was written, no wonder this person was blocked (and was probably socking with the last account.)

Most of that source simply does not apply, so what "guidelines" the editor was applying are completely unclear. That source allows quite massive copying! (With many subtle points covered, that are clear when one understands copyright law and issues around fair use.)

Posted by: jayvdb

"food poisoning" is not an expression; it is a technical term without any context, and it appears in dictionaries as such.

Posted by: HRIP7

Well, what is your point? I say it is not a creative expression, and you say it is not an expression. Where are we disagreeing?

Posted by: Abd

Okay, lilburne is earning some credibility here. "Minimum charge," though, isn't exactly that. It's a substitute for actual damages that a copyright owner may claim if liability is found. $150,000 (is that in the law? Or is that a maximum actual penalty assessed somewhere?) isn't any kind of "minimum charge," so I think that wording was accidentally incorrect.
"Contrary to law" and "illegal" are close synonyms. Civil copyright violation is not "contrary to law." But that's a point for legal theorists. If the law establishes a right of recovery for damages for an action, colloquially we might say that the action is "contrary to law." In some cases, though, all that does is establish a "price" for the action.

If you rent property, and you damage the walls, you are, by law (common law and statutory law), liable for the cost of repair. But only when you vacate the premises. I actually was involved in litigation over this. What if you like the wall with that paint on it? If you did not have permission to paint it, fine. You must, if the landlord insists, when you vacate, repaint it to make it like it was, and if you do not do so, the landlord can recover the cost of repainting. Was it "against the law" for you to, without permission, paint the walls? Of course not! It may or may not have been against your rental contract.
The first statement is correct. And that kind of vagueness is a very Bad Idea in law. It leads to unpredictability, and the whole purpose of rule-of-law is predictability.

However, this document, which more or less repeats what I quoted before from the Copyright Office, does bring up a possible defense for Wikipedia: claim that the entire site is a parody of all human knowledge....
I doubt that this will "hit" WP, because of the multiple layers of defense. This is an argument for lower-res images, though. 640 isn't quite "low res" as I was thinking.

But there are some interesting issues raised here about images.

Posted by: Ottava

Abd is randomly quoting people and going back to previous things and it is all out of order.

Most of it is rubbish, but it is so confused as rubbish that you can't even reply to it.

My favorite part is how he tries to say that age is somehow greater, as if being wrong for 60 years makes you better than someone who was right for one. o.O



Is Abd insane? Does he come up with a new persona, ramble on and on, and then think he is right? There seems to be no other explanation. Like his response to me is almost 100% jibber jabber. Could he have been drunk when coming up with it? I mean, seriously, I hope he sobers up and realizes how nonsensical his reply even was.

Posted by: lilburne

Fair-use has nothing to do with the nature of the user, it is concerned with the nature of the use. Read the link \from the University of Texas:
http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/intellectualPr...ty/clasguid.htm

pay attention to 'Spontaneity and 'Cumulative Effect' and the 'Prohibitions'. Now you'd think that the UT and others would know enough about the law and how to stay on the right side of fair-use would you not?

Remember that they are dealing with educational matters, which are directly specified in the 4 fair-use criteria, whilst non-profit is not.

Also if the nature of the user is taken into account, perhaps you can explain why the McCain campaign lost the Jackson Browne copyright case, and why DeVore lost his case too?

One further point if civil copyright violation isn't 'contrary to law' why are the Judges explaining what "authorized by law" means in DMCA case?
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/lenz_v_universal/lenzorder082008.pdf

Posted by: Abd

Warning: this is long, and could be considered "rambling." If you find reading my comments a waste of time, be my guest and don't read them. It is almost never obligatory. (My apologies to moderators who believe they must read everything, that is an exception that I always worry about.)

I don't think so, but the WR user interface is horrible when dealing with quotation formatting errors, and I often have to cut sections to figure out where the error is, and when I put them back, it's possible that this happens out of sequence, though I do take care not to do that. So far, in this thread, all -- or almost all -- have been two level, i.e., I'm quoting a writer, like Ottava, and sometimes those quotes includes his quotation of me. It should be pretty easy to interpret. Unless I made a mistake. I make mistakes, unlike Ottava.
But he replies anyway.
Rootless youth and disrespectful youth are condemned to repeat the history that they have contempt for. There is a certain level of rebellion and recognition that elders can be wrong, but assuming that this is the norm is extraordinarily foolish. Test it. Check it out. Try to understand it. See if you can express what elders are telling you in such a way that they will say, Yeah, you got it. Then you can truly criticize it. Until then you are merely callow and shallow, and probably lazy.
I say tit, he says tat, a child's game. It is what we expect from the immature. Some learn, some never do.

You want to find someone who's really smart? Look for someone who was wrong for 60 years and then learned and correct the error. Want to find someone really stupid? Look for someone who is always right.

Drunk? Ahem. Muslim, Ottava, get a clue. However, insane, yes, wasting my time imagining that Ottava will actually listen to some advice that might change his life, way for the better. I periodically try. Is that insane or is that validating course, allowing for possible correction? I'd say it was insane yesterday, I wasted way too much time. On the other hand, I learned a lot about copyright. I learn by writing, it is how I've become world-class in a few narrow subjects. Copyright is not one of them, but I now know much more than I did when I started. I wonder if Ottava has learned anything here?

Do I think I'm right? Right about what? Be specific. Most of the time, Ottava, indeed, you don't understand what's being said to you. You respond to your own imagination. Suit yourself, shadow box, but it irritates certain people, irritate them enough and you are history in this forum. I don't care that much, myself.

There is some real discussion going on here, but it's not with Ottava. It's about copyright and fair use, and how Wikipedia commonly allows and even encourages plagiarism, but is mostly protected against liability if it responds to takedown notices. Which will be rare if the plagiarism isn't extensive and damaging to the copyright owner.

There is a handy proof: Wikipedia has assets, it is not judgment-proof. It is highly visible, it will show up on searches, at or near the top. How many lawsuits have been filed for copyright violation against Wikipedia? (It's a question, I don't know, but my suspicion is, none.) How many have been successful, resulting in an actual judgment, as opposed, say, to a simple consent to take the material down?

Lenr-canr.org, by the way, is also highly visible. Search for a published paper that they host, and they often come up top. Rothwell has never been sued for copyright violation. Apparently, take-down notices are rare, and he simply takes the document down if he finds out that the author misrepresented permission.

Researching this copyright stuff, I came across academic opposition to the 1997 copyright law tightening. I don't wonder! Copyright was originally intended to provide a restricted period for authors to profit from their work. I was involved in a publishing activity that reprinted a book that had been publishing in, I think, about 1920. We thought, from the way the law had been (and I was working with someone who had been a publisher for maybe twenty years, Walter Bowart) that the copyright had expired. But the law had changed, many copyrights, expected to expire, were extended. Major windfall for companies that owned lucrative properties.... and some benefit for a few authors. We got a cease-and-desist order. Checking the law, we stopped. I don't know details beyond that, there may have been some settlement. They were not after blood! And that's the norm. Things have gotten crazy recently with the RIAA crackdown, etc.

To certain Wikipedia know-it-alls, copyright is simple. The reality is that it's a complex field, and it is very easy to make oversimplified statements that are misunderstandings or that don't apply to the situation being discussed, that happened numerous times in this discussion. The law and interpretation of fair use is still in flux, see http://www.eff.org/press/mentions/2010/7/29-1

See also the EFF discussion of http://www.eff.org/cases/viacom-v-youtube. Summary judgment. In short, that's grim for the plaintiff, the court considered the matter open and shut based on the filings of both parties, there was no fact needing to be determined by a trial. I was wondering about YouTube, reading the strict interpretations and warnings of risks here.

On point here is this analysis of the http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/youtube-wins-summary-judgment-viacom-dmca It mentions Wikipedia.

An issue we have not covered: what about a user who infringes copyright on Wikipedia? My opinion, the user is far more liable, but, as I mentioned, rarely would what Wikipedia loosely calls "copyvio" be of sufficient harm to a publisher to motivate the publisher to act. It is mostly covered by fair use, but details may be important.

As has been noted in some of the material I read on copyright violation, publishers tolerate "fan fiction," which are derivative works that are covered by copyright on the original works, because it helps maintain or amplify the market for the original works. But it's up to them if they want to shoot themselves in the foot, which they sometimes do by going after fans.

Ironically, parody is protected, as is, generally, commentary. An email is protected, but if I quote the email for the purpose of commentary, it may or may not be fair use. Generally, it's going to be seen as fair use, but this gets really complicated. My advice: life is full of risks, and if you attempt to avoid all of them, you may live a boring and unfruitful life. And a risk that you didn't manage to avoid gets you.....

The most present and real risks re copyright violation, the most common one now, would probably be people who "freely" share music files through some service like Kazaa or its equivalents or descendants. It really ought to be obvious that this is very risky, and the risks can be huge, as the case that I think Ottava was referring to shows. $2 million dollar judgment for a single mother with no money. On the other hand, when she looks back at her life, she might find that this improved her position! Depends on how she "processes" it. If you do something that is going to piss off people with the resources to sue you, don't be surprised if they respond as you might expect, and don't depend on "anonymity" to protect you. That veil can be pierced.

By the way, some of the commentary on that case thought that the jury found against her because they believed she was lying when she said she was innocent. Lots of people think that they will be protected by rules against self-incrimination. They do not understand that in a civil case, the rules are quite different from a criminal one. There is no rule against self-incrimination, and the plaintiff doesn't have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. The rule is preponderance of the evidence, i.e., the jury decided in her case that it was more likely she infringed the copyright than not. And since she was dealing with a mass distribution of a great deal of material, she broke all the small-scale protections she might otherwise have had. Sharing an MP3 with a friend? The risk is practically zero. Don't worry about it.

But running what is effectively a server distributing copyrighted material. Worry a great deal, you'd better make sure you are within the protections provided in the DCMA, and don't screw around with it. Wikipedia is in this category, and they do make sure. The most important factor is how they respond to a take-down notice, AFAIK.

Posted by: Abd

Fair use is concerned with the nature of the use, that is correct. A factor in that is the nature of the user!
Sure. The weird thing here is that this guideline is more permissive than I'd have imagined or advised. It is, to some extent, a compromise made between educational users and publishers, and, while it cannot completely counter or remove the rights of all publishers, if a teacher in practice follows those guidelines, it would probably prevent serious risk. I already commented on this document, which is designed for teachers reproducing materials to give to their students. Most of it doesn't directly apply to what we have been discussing.
That's a naive interpretation. Here are the http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html.
"Nonprofit" relates to the first factor. Yes, "educational purposes" are specified, but not exclusively. "Commercial nature" would refer to an attempt to profit from the use of material covered by copyright, and that profit could include, for example, being able to receive copyrighted material from others in exchange for what one provides. It does not have to be cash, but rather an attempt to obtain something with a monetary value. To pierce the limited non-profit protection, it looks like Free Republic was alleged to be profiting through providing advertising to a company controlled by the Free Republic owner.
Without reading the cases, I'll simply point out that no claim has been made that being nonprofit is a full protection. It is merely one of four factors to be considered. In addition, the factors are only concerned with whether or not a use is "fair use," which requires a judgment (it's a finding of fact, so, unless plaintiff and defendant agree, this requires a jury). If the use is fair use, the copyright owner cannot even order take-down, the use is permitted. So even if a use is determined not to be fair, whether an infringer is covered by a safe harbor -- and nonprofit is an aspect of that, but not exclusively controlling, like the others -- is about factors not listed in the four criteria.
Fascinating case, thanks.

The tables are turned here. The Plaintiff is the housewife, and the Defendant is Universal Music Corp et al, and the Plaintiff alleges that Universal Music Corp issued an improper takedown notice to YouTube. Plaintiff did provide YouTube with a "counter-notification," asserting fair use, and YouTube put the video back up. And the publicity has probably contributed to the popularity of this video, it's been seen well over a million times. Plaintiff has guts.

The ruling here is a denial of a motion to dismiss by the defendants. This means to me that the court considers the claim of fair use plausible, something that might be established (and this seems correct to me.) My guess is that there are forces behind this, not explicitly named, such as the EFF. Or that mother is a lawyer or married to one.... This would not be a game for amateurs!

The analysis in that brief is telling, and it is quite to the contrary of what I've understood lilburne as claiming. Is this trolling? Is lilburne serious, or is lilburne feeding me material to support what I've been saying? "Authorized by law" means that, under certain circumstances, copyright owners are "authorized" to require take-down. There is a difference between authorization and prohibition. Some kinds of copyright violation are clearly prohibited, but others are not. Establishing a right of ownership then allows an owner to assert the right. Until the rights are asserted, others are not "prohibited" from violating them. Rather, those uses potentially violate. If the user causes actual damage, the user is risking a judgment, etc. But risking judgment is not the same as violating a law. Nor is it necessarily morally reprehensible.

It's complicated, and the law is complex, and simplistic statements are generally not applicable to every situation.

"Authorized by law" occurs in two passages in the ruling.


The Court is concluding that fair use is authorized by law. It would also be understood that the right of a copyright owner to require take-down (or then to have certain further rights provided to recovery of damages) is "authorized by law." Note that the Court has stated something remarkable, though it is an ancient principle: an activity is authorized by law if it is not contrary to law. In Islamic law, an activity is permitted if not prohibited. I.e., the default for all activities is permission.

This is the core of the ruling:
This case, if it proceeds to trial, judgment is granted for the plaintiff, and is sustained on appeal, establishes that take-down notices for alleged infringement that is actually fair use may not be cost-free, that a copyright owner is required to make a reasonable assessment of whether or not a usage is "fair use" before demanding take-down. YouTube, I'll remark, respected the users counter-claim and put the material back up. It was following the DCMA in the part that provided rights to the users, that could possibly represent some level of courage on their part as well.

So I looked up the Lenz case on EFF.org, and, sure enough, http://www.eff.org/cases/lenz-v-universal This gets really interesting. The video is still hosted on youtube, and it is now the subject of commentary due to the copyright controversy, which probably caused a video that had been seen by less than 800 viewers to be seen by over a million. And it makes Universal and Prince (The music business formerly known as an artist) look look like idiots. Brilliant, eh?

There have been these actions in the case: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/lenz_v_universal/OrderGrantingPSJ.pdf http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/lenz-order-denying-motion-to-certify-interlocutory-appeal.pdf

So far, so good. It's not over till the final judgment, though, and, my guess, Universal will appeal this if they lose. I predict they lose and that they lose on appeal. Way to go, EFF.

Posted by: lilburne

Perhaps I was unclear but those guidelines are the minimum standards produced by the Copyright Office, and they are also used by the courts in determining educational usage. Note spontaneity:



That simply doesn't apply to wikipedia, there is almost always time to request permission from the copyright owner. Wikipedia is not operating on a classroom timescale. Cumulative Effect:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ21.pdf


An image of a building or object may be used to illustrate numerous language versions, or a number of different articles. As an example this:



could be used to illustrate the location where it is to be found, the person those tomb it is, the work of the C16 manufacturer, the development of alabaster stone carving and funeral monuments in Europe.



I'll wager that there are more than nine instances of copying on wikipedia and that they are permanent.



Isn't that precisely what wikipedia is supposed to do?

Note the commentary by the House of Representatives of what the courts should consider fair-use.



None of that covers a non-profit seeking to displace commercial works. I suspect that the licensing of the result for commercial use pretty much negates all non-commercialism claims.

Turning now to Lenz it is important to observe that a fair-use claim only arise as a defence to a copyright violation and that the phrase as used in the DMCA refers to:



If you prefer a copyright violation is taking without consent most will equate that as unlawful.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

One of my long-running pet peeves with Wikipedia is its use of the idiosyncratic phrase "copyright violation". The proper term of art is, of course, "copyright infringement", but Wikipedia came up with "copyright violation" early on (quickly shortened to "copyvio") and persists in using this otherwise meaningless bit of jargon despite determined efforts by those who know better to convince them not to. Yes, "violate" and "infringe" are nearly synonyms, but this is just another example of Wikipedia inventing its own jargon when the real world already has suitable phrases that mean the same thing.

As a result, I tend to ignore anyone who pontificates about copyright and who uses the phrase "copyright violation"; it indicates that the individual has not actually studied copyright, has had way too much of the Wikikoolaid to be trustworthy in judgment or reasoning, or (most commonly) both.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Of course, the same dismissal is earned by Wikipediot abuse of terminology like “original research” in ways that bear no sensible relation to the way such phrases are used in the real world.

Jon

Posted by: lilburne

Sometimes to engage with them, one has to use their Rogues' cant

Posted by: Abd

This is a repetition of the propaganda that copyright infringement is theft. It isn't theft. If it is a moral offense, it is a different one. That is, it may be some kind of "harm," but it is not a "taking." Nothing is taken. In Lenz, there was utterly no injury to the copyright owner. There was no loss of sales from that alleged infringement, it's preposterous to assume that (though if someone saw the video and disliked the music -- I have not watched the video -- they might not buy the music, but that is equivalent to fair use in criticism or parody, the courts have covered that.)

"Defense to a copyright violation" implies that there was a violation, when the court is clearly stating that if there was fair use, there was no violation, no infringement. The whole point of the Lenz lawsuit is to require copyright owners to consider fair use, and not to claim infringement when there is clearly fair use. As there was in this case, my opinion.

What lilburne quotes is simply part of the process of a takedown notice.

lilburne also made much of various aspects of that educational (classroom) fair use page that simply had no application to Wikipedia. Completely different considerations would apply to Wikipedia-type usages. Mostly Wikipedia is equivalent to an ISP, and infringement confined to infringement on the part of users, and, as I noted, unless a whole document is copied, or the core of it, it would ordinarily fall under fair use. Because images so greatly copy the original, this is where the risk is greatest. And, note, with images, a great fuss is made about requesting permission. I've never seen that with text for articles!

Posted by: lilburne

The above is a repetition of the freetard's propaganda that copyright theft is some victimless activity.

A friend of mine used to write diagnostic programs that helped those running and setting up CNC machines. He had very few sales, and eventually gave up trying to make a living from software. Then when as a support engineer he went into machine shops to fix or setup systems, almost every place he went into they were using his diagnostic programs.

The CAD/CAM software I write is extensively pirated. There are some 2000 family that are directly dependant on the sales, yet in some places you can go into site and see several 100 machine tools all with the software on the PCs and where the site has a handful of legit licenses.

My Nephew-in-Law is a sound engineer with his own studios and employs 15 other people, you'll find his work in films and TV programs. He has 3 kids, they live just outside of Paris and whilst he's not in some tenement block they aren't living a jetset lifestyle, in fact much of what they have is owned by the bank. Their income comes from the sale of the films.

Another friend (sadly dead now) was a lyricist and playwright. He was never a performer, though he did occasionally read some poetry. His income came from royalties on the sale of CDs containing songs with his lyrics, and the licensing of plays.

Some of the legit customers of our software use the software to design and make specialist props for films, futuristic sets, weapons, etc. They are also dependant on the sale of the films to make a living. We have other customers that are designing shoes, jewellery, watches etc. Those designs are then converted via our software into tooling for manufacture. It is those designs and digital files that are being pirated, the end result is a shadow pirate manufacturing plant. The cost to the US economy is huge, and people do get jail time when they get caught in that level of copyright infringement.

Our software is also used by the camera manufacturers Canon, Nikon, Olympus, etc. The driver behind improvements to optics, and sensors isn't the family snapshot taker, its those that are relying on copyright, the sports, fashion, wildlife, and news photogs.

Freetards doncha just love em.

Posted by: Obesity

YIKES! I just realized I use the phrase "copyright violation" in an email at work the other day.

What's happening to me??????????????????

Posted by: lilburne

Erumph! It was you that was claiming that a non-profit educational entity like WP got some extra freebies. Perhaps it does attract a degree of leniency, but that leniency doesn't stretch far. It is not a blanket waiver by any means and only comes into play in certainis restricted to limited circumstances, as the classroom examples show. Not much of which applies to online publishing,
particularly when that publication declares that the material found within it can be used commercially. Someone needs to bounce your head of the wall a few times until you understand that copying a small amount for a limited one off educational situation is fair-us, republishing the material and making it available for others to use commercially isn't a fair-use at all.

I'll note in passing that ISPs are commercial entities and that you have retreated from the earlier non-profit claims. Well done! At least we can now agree that whatever get out of jail card WP has, it has nothing to do with non-profit education.

As for the rest. Recently there were some 20,000 articles found to have been little more than C&P from sporting almanacs. That is copying en-mass. However, you don't need to have copied a whole work, you just need to have copied the essence of the work. The bulk of this BTW is a cut&paste of the tourist leaflet for the Basilica:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se_of_Lisieux

and the claim that this is PD is tenuous as I doubt that the uploader knows whether the photographer died before 1940:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TeresadiLisieux.JPG


make no mistake this sort of stuff is everywhere on the site. As I first said its the images and other media files that are going to be the problem. I've noted Feature Articles to be very close to the references used, and as the referenced book covers multiple subjects I'd not be surprised that other sections are freely used in multiple articles.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I'm guessing that was your second mistake.

Jon

Posted by: lilburne

Most likely. Though I do believe that they all aren't totally beyond redemption. Perhaps that's the third mistake.

Posted by: A Horse With No Name

I like what you have to say.

Posted by: Abd

I also prefer tit, obviously. It's got substance, something to chew on. Leads to other possibilities.

Posted by: Abd

Copyright theft would logically refer to making a claim of copyright that is contrary to legal right.

No. Copyright infringement isn't theft. That does not mean that it is not harmful, under some conditions, and if it is harmful, there are, by definition, victims. Lilburne is promoting the trope. That something causes you a loss does not make it theft. It makes it a tort. That some kinds of copyright infringement are criminal doesn't mean that you can be prosecuted for theft, you can be prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement.

However, that you have no brain capable of understanding these distinctions does make you a Wikipedia editor.
Duh. So he had a choice: sue them. Or serve them and make money doing it. If they were using his programs, the fact that he wrote them almost certainly gave him easier entry. Now, what does this have to do with theft? He has a sober choice to make. They are guilty of copyright infringement. They might be guilty of criminal infringement. Should he make a charge, or will he make more money from supporting them? He has the right to do either, in my book. He has the right to be stupid, also. I will not prejudge which course is stupid, if either is.

If a thousand people each steal $100 from me, I've lost $100,000. If a thousand and one people do the same, I have lost $100 more.

However, if a thousand people use software without a license from me, the author, how much have I lost? Assume that I offer the license for $100. And if it's 1001 people? Have I lost $100 more? Indeed, did I lose anything? It's unclear from the facts stated.

The problem is that it is highly unlikely that all those people would have used the software if not for being able to do it without paying.

Classic example: Microsoft OS and Office -- and, an old example, Works. What is the most successful software company in the world? And what company has the most "pirated" software? It is no coincidence that these are the same company, and there is more than one cause-effect relationship here. If it had not been possible to install DOS and, say, Works, without proving a license, many fewer people would have used these, and some percentage of those who installed unlicensed software converted to paying for it. I did. When I started I had no money, I barely was able to obtain the hardware. But as I started using it for business, I needed support and I needed the latest versions and I needed to be legal. So I bought it.

However, I could still transfer the program I bought from one computer to another, and, as I usually had at least two operating computers, did I buy another license? Well, no. Unless it was by buying a system with the OS included. However, Microsoft saw this as lost income, though, in fact, I still bought upgrades.

So they incorporated activation technology. The result? I stopped buying Microsoft software. I'm still using Windows 2000 Server, and I'm still using XP Pro, because it comes with a server license for RDP. The later versions don't. I don't know about others, but they shot themselves in the foot with me. I'd have upgraded both of those if they hadn't gotten greedy. If I need a new OS, I'll be looking seriously at open source.

It is completely unclear whether or not Microsoft lost income or profited from copyright infringement. I consider it quite possible that if infringement were impossible (as it can be made, with some functionality problems), they'd have had lower income, not higher.

I'm not arguing that copyright is invalid. I'm not arguing for "free" unless it's a choice made by those who do the work or invest the money. I'm simply saying that it is not theft, and attempting to condemn anyone who uses software without a license, by piggybacking on the ancient condemnation of "theft," is pure propaganda.
Well, you have a choice: you can go after them, or you can sell them stuff! It is hard to do both. Sensible companies look at the costs and benefits and don't go insane over "theft." It isn't theft. It's infringement, and you need to consider the needs of your customers if you want to serve them. A company that doesn't consider the needs of its customers and only looks at its own profit will be unable to survive, long-term.

Smart companies serve their customers well and profit because their customers want them to succeed. If your company goes out of business, they are up the creek. They will have huge costs to retrain or retool, very likely. Work together with them. These people are paying you money for the software. Not as much as you want, but if they cannot afford more, you would be trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip. If they can afford it, then your company should negotiate with them. Your costs are lower for dealing with a single customer with 100 licenses and one local person who handles support issues. You have no actual increased cost for granting them an additional license, if there are no additional persons to support. Anything they pay increases your bottom line. You have a strong negotiating position, because they are guilty of copyright infringement, but lean on that, you might get damages, or they will go belly-up and you get nothing but bad publicity, but you will not get a healthy customer, which is what you should really want. So negotiate a fair price for additional site licenses, perhaps non-transferable except if the whole company is sold.
He produces the films himself? He owns the copyrights? Or he serves companies or persons that do? If he's producing his own films, he is in one very tough business.
And I had a friend whose grandfather wrote Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Steady income, for a very long time. The point?

You are responding as if I had condemned copyright. I think you are fighting some other battle, with someone else. The level of emotional response you have to this will cloud your thinking. Be careful of that, it can seriously bite you in other areas. In your own work, your judgment of those CNC companies may impact your ability to serve them, it can leak into many aspects of your own behavior. It is hard to serve people whom you detest because they are "pirates" and "thieves."

This kind of thinking damaged Universal and Prince, who went after a mother for "infringement" when, if the alleged infringement did anything, it would have increased their income. If people liked the song. If I hear something I like in a video, as in the Lenz case, with low sound quality, re-recorded through a mike, am I going to play the video over and over just to hear the song, or will I buy a copy?

I cannot imagine a situation where this kind of "infringement" would a loss of income, in itself. The publicity from their take-down notice and the legal response probably has.

I'm thinking that it is quite possible, as I mention above, that Microsoft's obsession with their loss of fabulous imaginary wealth from piracy has actually damaged their income, when they made it far more difficult to pirate the software.

Make no mistake, I believe that they had the right to do that. They had the right to do something stupid. Or smart, people make their own decisions and so do corporations.
Yes. And appropriately so.

However, the law does recognize a difference between someone copying a friend's CD and someone mass-producing such for sale. They are both technically infringement, but the impact of the latter is serious. The former may, in fact, increase sales. If nothing else, it is free publicity for the product. That has a value. A considerable value, and it doesn't cost the copyright owner anything, except under this "theft" trope.
In another post, this idiot quotes me using the name Freetard. Clueless. Is unable to read and understand because of his assumptions.

Posted by: Abd

There are some issues of weight addressed here. Whether or not it makes it worth reading this is not the subject of any claim by me.

Well, I am free, but I'm not a 'tard, by any definition except, perhaps, "bastard" used in the sense of "someone with whom I disagree." I am not in favor of causing loss to copyright owners, of defying copyright, which is what liburne seems to imagine.Yes, and I still do. Clue, lilburne: when it looks to you like two statements from the same person are in contradiction, perhaps you have misunderstood one or both. If you cannot do this, if you cannot increase your understanding by finding a harmonizing interpretation, you will be damaged in your ability to understand others, or at least to recognize that you don't understand them.
It stretches far enough to be what I claimed. A factor.
No. That ("classroom examples") was not an analysis of general circumstances. It was advice for a specific circumstance, showing quite a liberal interpretation of what a class teacher could do, a bit more than I'd have expected. No "blanket waiver" was claimed.
First of all, that "not much applies" is what I wrote. It was lilburne who pointed to that page and abused material from it to make claims about copyright law as it would affect Wikipedia.
That is why I highly recommend wearing a hard hat. One runs into people like lilburne, and if if they don't slam my head against the wall, I might do it myself over the sheer stupidity.
Gad, this 'tard is confused. First. Yes. Copying a small amount for a limited educational situation is fair use. We agree on that. What else can we agree on here? Perhaps one or more of these:

1. Wikipedia is republishing material that may be covered by copyright in some way.
2. It may be protected in several ways: by fair use, by limited copying, as distinct from the entire work or core of the work, by its nonprofit status, by the educational purpose, and, as well, by the exemptions granted to ISPs. Each of these is only a partial protection, and hazards remain.
3. The hazards are mitigated or eliminated if Wikipedia takes down material upon a claim by a copyright owner that the use is infringing.
4. A counterclaim could be made, if it is believed that it was fair use, and Wikipedia could then continue to host the material, but this is probably inefficient and generally not advisable, plus it could invite a lawsuit for infringement, which could potentially be very expensive.
I think he really does not understand. There has been no retreat from "non-profit" claims. It is an aspect of how Wikipedia is protected. ISPs may be commercial or non-commercial, the "ISP exemption" isn't about being nonprofit, it is about not being directly responsible for the infringement; rather, the uploader may be. If the uploader misrepresents himself or herself as the copyright owner, this could be quite expensive! But the risk isn't to Wikipedia.
Right. However, that would be a single person copying. Indeed, if a single person took all the information from a sports almanac and distributed it through the project in articles for each athlete covered, as an example, that person could be infringing copyright, and massively, and could indeed be prosecuted for infringement, my opinion. The risk, however, isn't to Wikipedia, though there is a possible theory: that, once this was known, if Wikipedia, now being aware of it, and the copying being massive, there could be liability. But probably not, and here is why: the community is aware of it, legally. Not the WMF, and the WMF could disregard "takedown notices" from non-owners. It's an essential element of a takedown notice that copyright be asserted. The "community" isn't legally responsible, it is not a legal entity.

The community cannot be sued. That is unfortunate, because it does some really jerky stuff!

If the material were added by a hundred different people, it's not a copyright problem that risks damage to Wikipedia, assuming it takes down the material on notice. In the case cited, now, that it was C&P, did that make a difference? Probably. Facts cannot be copyrighted! But expression can.
Highly likely, photo date 1895. So what? There is no risk from this to Wikipedia. A user may be in error about the status, there is practically no risk to the user. This can get insanely complicated, and the law contemplates this. Basically, it's up to copyright owners to enforce their own copyrights, for all practical purposes. Was the photographer paid? Who owned the license? Was there a notice of copyright on the piece (which matters in many countries).

And should Wikipedia pay any attention to all this difficulty? I'd say it's utterly impractical. YouTube is probably the controlling precedent. If Viacom wins their lawsuit against YouTube, we should take another hard look at all this. YouTube's argument is that it is utterly impractical for them to check all the uploads, which is probably true. They are like an ISP. Almost certainly, that position will be sustained. It is completely impractical for them, as well, to require their users to be experts in copyright. As it is for Wikipedia.

Wikipedia should be very careful to give clear advice to uploaders and editors as to what is in the clear, and what to avoid to avoid personal liability for infringement. That does not mean that the community should consider copyvio some kind of emergency. It's largely wasted effort. (Restoring material after it's taken out by OTRS or an office action, that's an emergency, relatively speaking.)

And there is no practical way to quickly check for this, and, incorrectly, it's often been encouraged to paraphrase. That actually is no protection at all, legally. It is, however, a protection in a practical sense, it makes copyvio much more difficult to detect.

Now, if copyright infringement is a moral issue, then encouraging concealment of infringement by paraphrase is ...?

But this is what the community does. The WMF should make sure that legal advice given to users by guidelines and notices is accurate, because if it gives bad advice and a user gets sued, and loses, the user may be able to pass liability on to the WMF, based on detrimental reliance. Tricky question, actually.
If these are done by multiple editors, little or no risk to them or to the project. If they are done by a single editor, risk to the editor remains low (as a practical matter), but is elevated. There is still no risk to the project. If, however, the WMF comes to be legally aware of the violation, other than through a legal takedown notice, there is a *possible* and unproven risk, and if there is a takedown notice, the material must be taken down promptly, or serious risk arises; one already knows, then, that there is a copyright owner who has been motivated to act.

There is, however, a segment of the community which considers this "wait until the owner complains" -- which the law allows, in general -- to be morally repugnant. And it is this that leads to some serious problems.

It is forgotten that copyright law exists to encourage people to create works, and that this is for the public benefit. A copyright infringement that benefits the public is morally ambiguous, the harm is individual and unique, which is why the owners are given the right and the practical obligation of enforcement. If the owner doesn't care, there is no harm. If if the owner does care, make no mistake about it, I fully support the right of the owner to act within the law, provided they do not cause undue harm (and in that case, the remedy would be to fix the law, or to, say, boycott the owner, depending.)

Ah, one more aspect of the confusion. About commercial use of Wikipedia material. Wikipedia may use certain material under "fair use," and is protected, partially, by its nonprofit educational purpose. A commercial entity may not be so protected. Wikipedia cannot promise that material from Wikipedia can be republished without risk of infringement. Period. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights
Lilburne had written:
Wikipedia does not make copyrighted material "available for others to use commercially." It can't, unless the copyright owner has released it. The material quoted above is covering fair use images, in particular, but it also covers copyright violation in general. The language is loose, it speaks of "violation," when the term, as has been pointed out, is infringement, but the substance is correct.

Posted by: lilburne

Well Duh too. Perhaps he decided to feed his family rather than sue his employer's customers for nickels and dimes.

No one believes that each infringement is a direct loss, that is another freetard myth. I'm absolutely sure that the 100s of guys downloading cracks of our software are never going to hand over $25K to buy it, they're just trying to learn how to use the software to make themselves more employable, good luck to them. The problem is with the companies who are using it to drive shed loads of $750K machines. Why do they do that? Simply because they can, and yeah when we make the cracking more difficult, when they can no longer get regular updates, then they'll move on to something easier to steal.


Back in the 1980s everyone had a copy of Lotus 123, WordPerfect, dBase IV, whatever the top DTP package was. Hardly anyone needed any of the stuff to calculate their fuel bils, keep their record collections, write a letter to the bank, or to produce a leaflet for the local youth club, no one would have bought those packages for the real use that they had for them.

There were plenty of apps for a few $ that could do those jobs and quite a lot of innovation, all of that went. For some of the small companies using cracks of our software they simple don't need it, there are adequate alternatives for them at a tenth of the cost. The cracks effectively stifle development of those systems. 15 years ago there were start ups every other month. I don't recall seeing any new systems in the last 8 years or so.

YouTube do have the ability to check the uploads, they can detect video and/or audio within an hour of uploading.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/youtube-vs-fair-use.html

they could do most of this back when viacom first sued. The issue at that time was Google were withholding the application of the detection and removal system from content holders that wouldn't agree to license the content to Google. IOW viacom wouldn't pay into the Google protection racket.

http://gigaom.com/video/viacom-google-used-piracy-for-profit/

Posted by: Abd

He made a decision. However, it wouldn't be "nickels and dimes." The issue, instead, would be whether he could wait out the process. If he could prove infringement on the scale you are talking about, he might collect enough to retire on. After paying for the attorney. Or he could decide that it's too risky, or that he could not "invest" the delay. Family to support and all that. His call. I made no claim that he decided incorrectly.
Fed by people like you calling infringment "theft," because with theft, each theft is a loss.
You make your choice. Instead of seeing these companies as an opportunity, you see them as a problem. You want them to get updates, they will pay for those. The art of this is figuring what you need, what your customers can pay, and extracting it from them, and they, if you do it right, will believe -- correctly -- that they are getting a good deal.

$750K machines? What's the yearly cost, amortized? Almost certainly the company doesn't really own these machines, the bank does, or a leasing company. You are selling the software for $25K a seat, I assume. What's the yearly maintenance? 15%? Site licenses at a lower rate? And what choices do these companies have besides using your software?
There are plenty of other causes for that shift. From what you've told me so far, I suspect that your company may be benefiting from the cracks more than it loses. If the company plays it right. Consider those small companies you mention. The large companies, go after them, make them pay, do it visibly. The small companies, leave them alone. You want them using your software. They may become large companies later, and because large companies have deeper pockets, usually, they will then have far more motive to come in out of the cold, but, in addition, every one of their employees who learns how to use your software, who becomes familiar with it, assuming it's good software, will be a missionary for it. If they end up in a company that is ready to buy, they will advocate for it. They won't want to work with something inferior, and they won't want to shift to something equivalent that requires retraining.

Now, every situation in every industry is different. Maybe what I'm saying doesn't apply to your situation. But as long as you let yourself be manipulated by loaded concepts like "theft," you won't be able to think clearly about it. It's copyright infringement, not theft, and some of it does harm and some of it doesn't.

Generally, those guilty of criminal infringement know what they are doing, they aren't innocent, and the damage they do is not trivial. The tragic situations are where people really didn't realize what they were getting into, allowing their computer to be a Kazaa server!