Open Stack

On 2015-07-11 19:39:25 +0200 (+0200), Andreas Jaeger wrote:
[...]
> Do we need some large boilerplate somewhere that says "Do not copy
> contents from anywhere - especially wikipedia?"

[I am not a lawyer, but...] Most of the content on Wikipedia is
licensed under terms[1] requiring attribution (and also conveyance
of GFDL or CC-BY-SA into the derivative work but that goes beyond my
point). Copying content from anywhere without attribution, including
from Wikipedia, is almost certainly copyright infringement in at
least the (currently) 168 jurisdictions which participate in the
Berne Convention[2]. That is to say, it is "against the law"
(so-called "public domain" and non-attribution licenses
notwithstanding, but even then I personally always feel that it's
necessary to note the source of material you're copying regardless
of whether it's required by a license of copyright so that its safe
reuse can be confirmed by other parties).

While I don't doubt that some people may not know they are breaking
laws by doing this, it nevertheless boils down to needing to tell
people not to engage in illegal activity when contributing to our
projects and I'm not sure where to draw the line on which laws we
need to remind people not to break and which ones are just common
sense (for example, I always thought not violating someone else's
copyright was thoroughly ingrained in people involved in free
software projects since that's the present legal underpinning of our
ability to keep it free in the first place).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks#License
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
-- 
Jeremy Stanley