I would also like to see some rule allowing the deletion of blatant copyright violations. The percentage of articles that are rescued after being posted on Wikipedia:Copyright problems is minuscule and the danger of losing good content by making them easier to delete is small. - SimonP 17:46, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)
Completely agree with the intent, completely disagree with the wording. Reasons: what's "blatant"? What's "easily verifiable"? And of course, what's a "legitimate contribution"? Don't single out "legitimate contributions", ever, unless you want to explicitly accuse specific individuals of being sockpuppets.
Surely we just want Proposal V to stop enthusiastic newbies and spam vandals from cutting and pasting swaths of text from websites—for anything more, we'll just have to talk it out on Wikipedia:Copyright problems. To that end, I suggest:
A few important points of clarification.
Similarly, "identical to" looks very strong, but is necessary: if the article's content is not identical, but contains edits, it's possible that it is the only existing copy, and you are needlessly making someone's derivative work unavailable because they forgot to say they held the copyright to the original material.
An alternative is to merely demand that the material is clearly derived from material that exists elsewhere, but only if administrators are prepared to promptly undelete any speedy based on material that turns out to be GFDL-compatible, and only if we're prepared to deal with the shock and hurt of people who suddenly lose their preciously edited article because they were careless. I say it's not worth it: just put it on Wikipedia:Copyright problems if you can only claim clear derivation. Of course, as always, we rely on the good judgement of administrators: if the only difference is that, say, one sentence has been removed in the middle, you should still call it "identical" (or rather "trivial to restore it if you'd want to").
We can discuss limiting the posted notification to registered users only, so as to not burden admins unnecessarily with messages that are likely to never be noticed or go to the wrong person. I do believe we should always inform registered users, just in case it's a clueless newbie problem or a cooperating copyright holder of little words. This can simply be a boilerplate message asking the user to please state why the material is not in violation despite having all appearance of being so, and direct them to the appropriate problem pages; this does not need to be signed and can be automated for admins to the point where they only have to fill in a URL pointing to the material that was duplicated.
Just a few absurdly detailed suggestions to make it more likely to pass. ;-) JRM 18:51, 2004 Dec 10 (UTC)
This is a reformulation of my "identical" demand above, which should be slightly easier and also uncontroversial: it doesn't really matter whether people have "improved" it (what's improvement?) only if they've edited it. If anyone else has: hands off and report as copyright violation.Any article that consists only of blatant, easily verifiable violation of copyright, which has undergone no significant editing by its creator and no any editing by anyone else.
The "instructions" would be simple enough, namely, to inform someone that you are the copyright holder of the material. I'm not sure if that should be a separate page or just Wikipedia:Copyright problems, but it should not just be "you can't post copyrighted material", because that's false.The editor must subsequently be informed on their talk page that such deletion has happened, with an external reference to the existing material, and instructions on how to prevent this from happening again.
Thanks for your thoughts. Firstly, the "a user or IP with no legitimate contributions" is intended, I believe, to give the benefit of the doubt to users who have been good contributors. Secondly, are you sure you don't want to include a GFDL qualifier? I think it might be a good thing. My only problem with your notification clause is the word "this" from "how to stop this from happening again". It's unclear what the pronoun "this" is referring to. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 20:09, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
By the way, I like JRM's last revision of the proposal, I think I'm going to use that one. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 22:48, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
This proposal seems to be be running into resistance centered around the phrase "easily verifiable violation of copyright". I don't see how, in practice, this is any different from a less-controversial "verified violation of copyright", since the second part requires a talk page message including the external reference—which can only be provided if one's already been found. — Korath ( Talk) 07:47, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)
I voted against this proposal because I think our current copyvio procedure works fine. But I have another idea for a CSD: pages that are inherently obvious as copyvios and don't need Google testing or any other outside evidence to show that they're copyvios. Examples would include music lyrics and copies of well-known printed works or scripts. In nearly all of these cases, the material is blatantly unencyclopedic in addition to being a copyright problem. More importantly, music lyrics and the like could get Wikipedia in far more trouble than routine, garden-variety copyvios such as text dumps from websites. Szyslak 02:56, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Also, I was thinking we might want to come up with another way to handle these cases besides speedy deletion—"speedy copyvio," perhaps. That would lighten the load on regular copyvio and keep borderline cases out of speedy deletion. Szyslak 03:03, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I would also like to see some rule allowing the deletion of blatant copyright violations. The percentage of articles that are rescued after being posted on Wikipedia:Copyright problems is minuscule and the danger of losing good content by making them easier to delete is small. - SimonP 17:46, Dec 5, 2004 (UTC)
Completely agree with the intent, completely disagree with the wording. Reasons: what's "blatant"? What's "easily verifiable"? And of course, what's a "legitimate contribution"? Don't single out "legitimate contributions", ever, unless you want to explicitly accuse specific individuals of being sockpuppets.
Surely we just want Proposal V to stop enthusiastic newbies and spam vandals from cutting and pasting swaths of text from websites—for anything more, we'll just have to talk it out on Wikipedia:Copyright problems. To that end, I suggest:
A few important points of clarification.
Similarly, "identical to" looks very strong, but is necessary: if the article's content is not identical, but contains edits, it's possible that it is the only existing copy, and you are needlessly making someone's derivative work unavailable because they forgot to say they held the copyright to the original material.
An alternative is to merely demand that the material is clearly derived from material that exists elsewhere, but only if administrators are prepared to promptly undelete any speedy based on material that turns out to be GFDL-compatible, and only if we're prepared to deal with the shock and hurt of people who suddenly lose their preciously edited article because they were careless. I say it's not worth it: just put it on Wikipedia:Copyright problems if you can only claim clear derivation. Of course, as always, we rely on the good judgement of administrators: if the only difference is that, say, one sentence has been removed in the middle, you should still call it "identical" (or rather "trivial to restore it if you'd want to").
We can discuss limiting the posted notification to registered users only, so as to not burden admins unnecessarily with messages that are likely to never be noticed or go to the wrong person. I do believe we should always inform registered users, just in case it's a clueless newbie problem or a cooperating copyright holder of little words. This can simply be a boilerplate message asking the user to please state why the material is not in violation despite having all appearance of being so, and direct them to the appropriate problem pages; this does not need to be signed and can be automated for admins to the point where they only have to fill in a URL pointing to the material that was duplicated.
Just a few absurdly detailed suggestions to make it more likely to pass. ;-) JRM 18:51, 2004 Dec 10 (UTC)
This is a reformulation of my "identical" demand above, which should be slightly easier and also uncontroversial: it doesn't really matter whether people have "improved" it (what's improvement?) only if they've edited it. If anyone else has: hands off and report as copyright violation.Any article that consists only of blatant, easily verifiable violation of copyright, which has undergone no significant editing by its creator and no any editing by anyone else.
The "instructions" would be simple enough, namely, to inform someone that you are the copyright holder of the material. I'm not sure if that should be a separate page or just Wikipedia:Copyright problems, but it should not just be "you can't post copyrighted material", because that's false.The editor must subsequently be informed on their talk page that such deletion has happened, with an external reference to the existing material, and instructions on how to prevent this from happening again.
Thanks for your thoughts. Firstly, the "a user or IP with no legitimate contributions" is intended, I believe, to give the benefit of the doubt to users who have been good contributors. Secondly, are you sure you don't want to include a GFDL qualifier? I think it might be a good thing. My only problem with your notification clause is the word "this" from "how to stop this from happening again". It's unclear what the pronoun "this" is referring to. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 20:09, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
By the way, I like JRM's last revision of the proposal, I think I'm going to use that one. BLANKFAZE | (что??) 22:48, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
This proposal seems to be be running into resistance centered around the phrase "easily verifiable violation of copyright". I don't see how, in practice, this is any different from a less-controversial "verified violation of copyright", since the second part requires a talk page message including the external reference—which can only be provided if one's already been found. — Korath ( Talk) 07:47, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)
I voted against this proposal because I think our current copyvio procedure works fine. But I have another idea for a CSD: pages that are inherently obvious as copyvios and don't need Google testing or any other outside evidence to show that they're copyvios. Examples would include music lyrics and copies of well-known printed works or scripts. In nearly all of these cases, the material is blatantly unencyclopedic in addition to being a copyright problem. More importantly, music lyrics and the like could get Wikipedia in far more trouble than routine, garden-variety copyvios such as text dumps from websites. Szyslak 02:56, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Also, I was thinking we might want to come up with another way to handle these cases besides speedy deletion—"speedy copyvio," perhaps. That would lighten the load on regular copyvio and keep borderline cases out of speedy deletion. Szyslak 03:03, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)