Kudos To Wikimedia Foundation For Resisting All Government Requests To Censor Content
from the good-to-see dept
Wikimedia's new Transparency Report has been getting some attention, in part because it brought attention back to the whole monkey selfie copyright debacle. However, the rest of the transparency report itself is rather interesting, starting with the fact that it appears that Wikimedia rejected every request to pull down information (unrelated to copyright, which we'll get to in a second). In most transparency reports, this involves government and law enforcement requests to censor content, along with the occasional claims of defamation and whatnot. Either way, Wikimedia felt a grand total of none of them were legit:
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Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dmca, take downs, transparency
Companies: wikimedia
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Copyright claim on an entire language
QUOTE
A Tasmanian aboriginal language center demanded the removal of the English Wikipedia article on 'palawa kani', claiming copyright over the entirety of the language. We refused to remove the article because copyright law simply cannot be used to stop people from using an entire language or to prevent general discussion about the language. Such a broad claim would have chilled free speech and negatively impacted research, education, and public discourse—activities that Wikimedia serves to promote.
END QUOTE
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Re: Copyright claim on an entire language
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Re: Re: Copyright claim on an entire language
So, you create a new language to replace those that have become extinct, only to... lock that up behind copyright so that nobody speaks it and it becomes unused and extinct? WTF?
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Does 0% REALLY mean none?
The site actually says "0%" were honored, which if they are rounding to the nearest integer using any of the common rounding algorithms could mean that one request was honored.
Just saying.
The current (non)privacy climate sure breeds suspicion and paranoia.
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The breakdown is great to see, although it's clearly just a few select highlights. It's a shame to see a copyright notice against an entire language, of all things. You know the copyright maximalists have corrupted the landscape when a complete method of communication is attempted to be locked up, for whatever reason.
Another example of how ridiculous this thing has become is the DMCA notice of a photo of the Obama/Mandela meeting. As described, it should have been public domain, but actually wasn't because of the capacity in which the photographer was working at that moment. Even though, it would normally be a public domain image has he been working officially at the time.
In other words, to correctly identify the copyright, you not only have to know the setting and ownership of the photo but the exact status of the photographer's employment at the time it was taken. But, remember, kids, Google can just write an algorithm that can correctly identify copyright without fail, it's that easy! What a shame some people are stupid enough to believe that.
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