User talk:PaulBurns

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Copyright warning
Hi Paul, just wanted to tell you that the article you edited, Pre Cinema History, will likely be deleted for copyright problems. Unfortunately, Wikipedia requires that all content be created by the editor or used with explicit permission from someone else's work. You can read more about what you can and can't add to the Wikipedia at Copyright FAQ; it might be worth a quick perusal. Also, you might want to look a little harder to make certain that you're not re-inventing the wheel when writing a new article. Wikipedia already has articles on precursors of film and a decent background on the subject at history of film - you're welcome to help expand those articles or create a new article on a subset topic, so long as it doesn't violate our copyright policy. (As a general rule, I'd recommend that you not copy and paste website content unless you personally authored it.) Thanks for your time! Girolamo Savonarola 21:05, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Calm down. I'm an editor - I have a right, as does every other user, to notify the community about what may be construed as copyright violations. As I noted above, there is no problem with copying content you created. I apologize that I did not note that you were the website author. However, we tend to err on the side of caution due to legal issues should we store copyrighted material without permission. Had you responded to this a year ago, we could have more easily rectified the situation. Girolamo Savonarola 19:30, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I am an editor, as are you. Every user is considered an editor. Additionally, you do not own the articles, so please stop acting like you do. Finally, please read the good faith and no personal attack policies, because if you continue to act in this way and refuse to discuss this matter civilly, I will request an admin to step in.


 * Wiki is by its nature a collaborative process, and this means many people will be involved with all articles. In the case of your article, I spotted what I believed to be a copyright violation at the time. This was done to both protect your work from what was thought to be an outside party copying it and protect Wikipedia from liability in publishing this as if it were our own. The article was publicly tagged for discussion on the matter for one week, and in the absence of any comments from anyone, was therefore presumed to be a copyright violation and deleted. That is the entirety of the matter. If you have any more questions regarding this, please feel free to discuss it further with either me or an admin of your choosing. If you would like to recreate the article, it would obviously not be thought to be a copyvio this time around. Girolamo Savonarola 23:55, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Civility
Hello. Here on Wikipedia, we have a civility policy. Comments like this and this violate that policy. we also have a copyright policy. This says, among other things, that copyrighted text may not be posted to Wikipedia. When text is copied from a website and pasted into a Wikipedia article or page, the normal presumption is that it is a copyright infringement. Even if the person who pasted it says that he or she is the original author of the website, we need, for legal reasons, to have proof on file, as anyone can claim to be anyone on the web. There are various ways to establish such a claim, but the message that Girolamo Savonarola sent you was absolutely standard in such a case. I'm sorry that you failed to notice it at the time and explain the matter before the page was deleted. But this often happens, because we need to err on the side of caution on copyright matters.

Please understand that no one is out to get you here, or acted in any way differently on this article than on tens of thousands of others deleted in similar circumstances. Please remain polite to other editors, even when you disagree with their actions. Thank you. DES (talk) 00:33, 16 July 2007 (UTC)