Wikipedia:Copyright problems/2009 February 25

25 February 2009

 * We appear to have have 422 articles which include one or several links to newspaper articles hosted, without license, on rickross.com, in what looks like direct contravention of WP:LINKVIO policy. — To give an example, the first article in the search results page, Community Chapel and Bible Training Center, has 22 links to unlicensed copies of newspaper articles. — Fair_use, L.A._Times_v._Free_Republic make clear that we are on shaky ground here in terms of contributory infringement. — The rickross.com disclaimer is of no help either: "Warning -- All META tags, page titles, keywords and other content descriptions used throughout this website are only intended to assist search engines for research and locating purposes. This in no way, shape or form is intended to mislead anyone by implying any official representation and/or relationship exists between this website and the owners of any trademarks, service marks and/or copyrights, which may contain the same keywords and/or titles. ... Any publisher, Webmaster or news service (i.e., official and legal holder of copyright) that objects to their material being included in this archive may request that it be removed and/or that future material be excluded. An official written and signed request sent via fax or regular mail made by the copyright holder and/or their legal representative on company or legal letterhead will be honored. — Some of the material hosted on rickross.com is for sale online by the legitimate owners. Example:  — Apart from the potential copyright issue, there are also some reliability problems with the material hosted on the site, i.e. unmarked deletions/changes in the hosted articles. For further details, see  on Durova's talk page.  Jayen 466 12:47, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree with you that this seems to be a problem. This situation seems analogous to me to that discussed here, with Lyricwiki. There may be appropriate uses, but many will not be. I would strongly recommend you consider bringing this up at User talk:XLinkBot/RevertList, which "does not disable the use of a link" but prevents unregistered and new users, who may not know our policies, from adding it. Removing the inappropriate ones, of course, is going to be a tremendous pain. This isn't precisely a CP issue, since there's no substantial text involved, so I'm not going to volunteer to help with it at this point because I'm already involved in a multiweek copyright text clean-up, here, and I've got probably two more weeks or so ahead of me on that (when not working on active CP listings, it's been getting most of my Wiki time). You might find volunteers at WT:EL or WT:C, though, who are willing to evaluate the links to see if their usages are legitimate and remove them if they aren't, or maybe someone else reviewing this listing will have time at the moment to chip in and check out a few dozen. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 14:15, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Technical Alliance ([ history] · [ last edit]) from http://www.technocracy.org/Archives/Technical%20Alliance%20Profiles-r.htm. This is a relist from Copyright problems/2009 February 17, which see. Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:33, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Cleaned via selective deletion. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:00, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Battle of Monterrey was copy & pasted from here --Tresckow (talk) 15:28, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
 * It looks very likely that this is the other way around. We've had the article since 2003. The external site is archived only to 2006; see . If you look at the earliest version of our article, it contains some of the language in that archived version, but not all. Our article originally started like so: "At the Battle of Monterrey, May 21st-23rd, 1846, Lieutenant General Pedro de Ampudia and the Mexican Army of the North managed to fight American troops to a standstill at the important fortress town of Monterrey during the Mexican-American War. After a number of embarassing defeats and near misses, the Army of the North attempted to retreat south and refit before engaging the seemingly unbeatable American forces under General Zachary Taylor." With minor changes (including the correction of the spelling of embarrassment), that version remained in place for almost 6 months before it began to resemble the current form, here. You can see the evolution of the article through its inception to 11 February 2006, which I believe is the version copied by that external site, here. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 15:56, 25 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Navicus ([ history] · [ last edit]) from http://www.navicus.com/company/about_us. Moonriddengirl (talk) 20:49, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
 * 3rd Indian Division ([ history] · [ last edit]) from http://warpath.orbat.com/indian_divs/3_ind_div.htm. Buckshot06(prof) 21:12, 25 February 2009 (UTC)