>Stolen content (i.e. content not explicitly licensed as GFDL/CC by the author) is stolen content.
Do you mean by wikipedia's definition of stolen? Because some things, like for instance: the description of Lora taken from the website that exists to provide descriptions of Lora to people, has an implicit usability.
Like I said, this irked me more than it probably should. I totally get sometimes stuff will get caught in the margins.
Wikipedia's mission is NOT about usability, but to provide an encyclopedia that can be used, edited, forked, reproduced EVERYWHERE without anyone having to fear lawyer attacks.
It's not a "free as in free beer" encyclopedia, it's a "free as in truly free" encyclopedia.
(Yes I know that this is only valid for the text content, images (e.g. logos) and screenshots are not free but used under different legal regimes in different countries)
> Wikipedia's mission is NOT about usability, but to provide an encyclopedia that can be used, edited, forked, reproduced EVERYWHERE without anyone having to fear lawyer attacks.
To that, I say [citation needed]. Where in their mission statement do they state this particular stance on lawyer attacks?
> the description of Lora taken from the website that exists to provide descriptions of Lora to people, has an implicit usability
that's not how copyright law works. you may argue that it should work that way, but it does not work that way unless you petition Congress to modify it
Yeah, but it's a relatively safe bet that an organization would rather be represented by their own carefully-reviewed, professionally-crafted verbiage than one hastily thrown together by a volunteer editor, and thus would not pursue action against the publisher.
I'm not saying that Wikipedia should use content without the appropriate licensure, but in practice, copyright is violated as a matter of routine to provide some fairly basic services. Copyright law should be amended to prevent liability for conventional uses.
Like I said, I don't think it'd be a good idea for Wikipedia to start copying and pasting from random websites without the appropriate clearances. I do think it'd be a good idea to revise the law so that normal uses are not illegal anymore.
Yes, they are among the biggest copyright aggressors of the world. Just like L Lessig, I care about common sense copyright policy, which forces me to care about reforming the U.S. campaign finance system so that congress can represent the people again.
Then the organization should have provided the text under an appropriate free license if they wanted it to be broadly reused. (Which is actually a good idea and more organizations should probably do for boilerplate they'd like others to cut and paste.)
Organizations would put the boiler plate under a "You can copy and paste, but no modifications, please." licence. Wikipedia would need special support (machine enforced or not) for blocks of text that can only be used or removed in their entirety, but not changed.
Come to think of it, that's not too different from how quotations work. So they might be able to deal with them.
I hereby declare "woo only, soon only, double aggrandizingly you bodly - rigatoni" all rights reserved. I am the author of this. I reserve all rights to this phrase forevermore.
Here's what an unofficial essay on Wikipedia says and I think it sums it up sensibly:
> The copied material should not comprise a substantial portion of the work being quoted, and a longer quotation should not be used where a shorter quotation would express the same information. What constitutes a substantial portion depends on many factors, such as the length of the original work and how central the quoted text is to that work.
Stolen content (i.e. content not explicitly licensed as GFDL/CC by the author) is stolen content.