Copyright Infringement In Wiki

There are a few wiki pages that contain poems, song lyrics, photographs, cartoons, and other verbatim works. These uses could arguably be considered copyright infringement, and not FairUse of those works. Some examples:

Regardless of what we all think about the desirability and validity of CopyRight laws, the fact is that Ward could get in trouble for "publishing" such things on his web site. No one wants that. So I propose that we eliminate and discourage the use of any such material. In most cases, a link to the work on another site would serve the same purpose as quoting it in its entirety here. -- KrisJohnson (who would like to make an exception for the CookieMonster image)

Usually, when the big bad lawyers come down on someone for a perceived infringement, they're perfectly happy if the content is simply taken down. The possibility of Ward getting dragged into court for this sort of thing is pretty small, I'd bet.

Now, you could make the point that Wiki is not a library, nor a quote dictionary, nor a lyrics book, and that large quotations aren't really using Wiki at its best.

Is this legal advice? I am sure that Ward has consulted with those competent in the legal arena and would disable image links from pages if they were in fact infringements.

Some would consider the images as advertisements of the site from which they come. For example images of book covers from Amazon. In fact these are wanted linkages for which financial benefits accrue to Ward. The display of the image on your machine is a result of a reference which your browser handles. That seems to be fair use, since the image is available and can be seen by the browser independently of the Wiki.

Some counterexamples:

See also WikiCopyRights

CategoryWiki

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