Re: basicmusic.net noncompliance

On Tuesday 18 November 2003 23:06, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Yep. That is blatant and needs to be either taken down or fixed. However it
> is my understanding that unless you are a significant contributor to any of
> those articles you do not have the authority to send a takedown notice to
> an ISP (anybody can send compliance reminders though). And even if you were
> a significant author of one or more of the articles, your authority would
> only extend to those articles you significantly contributed to (but that
> may be a moot point; the ISP would probably pull the plug on the whole
> website since that would be the easiest - and most prudent - thing for them
> to do).
>
> Thus I think there is a need for Wikimedia to obtain a registered
> collection copyright on the set of articles copied. Then an official
> Wikimedia representative can send out the take-down letter.
>
> So I do agree that this has progressed to the ISP take-down letter stage,
> however I'm pretty sure no one person can legally do that yet (at least for
> all the copied content). In the meantime you may want to find the major
> contributors to many of those articles and 1) tell them about the copyright
> violation and 2) ask them to let you contact the ISP on their behalf. But
> that still may need copyright registration (or is that only needed before
> bringing something before a court?)
>
> IANAL so I would like to hear what a lawyer has to say (even off the
> record).
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

I must admit that I'm getting a bit frustrated. Are we going to enforce the 
GFDL on our articles or not? There seems to be a need for a document written 
by a lawyer which specifies unequivocally the requirements of people who copy 
our content, and an exact procedure for dealing with people that don't abide 
by those exact requirements. 

Sure, we could just go teetering along as we are at the moment, but then what 
is the point of even releasing wikipedia under the GFDL? We might as well 
release it into the public domain. Either we care about the fact that others 
are taking our content and claiming copyright to it or we do not. I can 
understand if going after violators is not a priority at the moment, but then 
this has to be made clear. In that case I will not continue wasting my time 
sending emails to webmasters and otherwise researching whether or not someone 
is using our GFDL material improperly.

Best,
Sascha Noyes
-- 
Please encrypt all email. Public key available from 
www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc