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It's perfectly possible to find the source of the infringement with a little investigation. The user who created the page has a comment on their talk page notif
by mgbennet 5y ago
It's perfectly possible to find the source of the infringement with a little investigation. The user who created the page has a comment on their talk page notifying them that Donna Strickland page has been nominated for deletion due to "unambiguous copyright deletion". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SteplightJohnson#Speedy_deletion_nomination_of_Donna_Strickland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SteplightJohnson#Spe...] There's a link to the source that was copied, [http://www.osa.org/en-us/about_osa/leadership_and_volunteers/officers/strickland/ http://www.osa.org/en-us/about_osa/leadership_and_volunteers...]. That leads to a 404, but in the Wayback Machine, I found this on Dr. Strickland: [https://web.archive.org/web/20130426010318/http://www.osa.org/about_osa/leadership_and_volunteers/officers/president/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130426010318/http://www.osa.or...] And the second paragraph is a word for word copy of the summary from the first edit in the history of the page, "Created page with ''''Donna Strickland''' is a past president of the Optical Society. She has worked on several committees within the OSA. She has been on the editorial board of O...'" [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&dir=prev&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&...]
- jessaustin 5y agoSo do you agree with the original deleting editor that quoting a press release is copyright infringement? We seem to be venturing farther and farther into Crazytown here... Good job on chasing this down!
- mgbennet 5y agoWell, the article was copy pasted from a web page with a big old "Copyright ©2013 The Optical Society" at the bottom. So yeah, it's textbook copyright infringement; press releases (or publicity blurbs, in this case) are protected by copyright law. I don't think the Optical Society was likely to pursue legal action against Wikipedia for this, but it's perfectly reasonable for Wikipedia to enforce a policy of "don't copy paste copyrighted material into articles."