Talk:Haunted Hollywood
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[edit] Copyvios
I mentioned on the haunting page why there may be a good reason to re-write all the articles that use Quest as a base from scratch. Articles on Wikipedia need to be free from copyright because they are open source and repurposed through the GNU Free Documentation License, to anyone, anywhere. If someone wanted to reuse material on Wikipedia, they should only have to abide by the policies of Wikipedia's GNU Free Documentation License, and not have to worry about a third-party's unclear copyright usage. While Quest says that articles are free to use, the page still says it is copyrighted. That's not a clear release of copyrights.
It's not public domain, nor is it licensed through clear policies like the Creative Commons license. There's an important distinction there. Although Quest may allow someone to use the article:
Quest -> Someone else
The way it works on Wikipedia is that articles can be used again by third parties:
Quest -> Wikipedia -> Someone else
Quest has not clearly authorized Wikipedia to regrant licensing.
--Nealparr (yell at me|for what i've done) 23:15, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
To make more clear why the distinction is important, in addition to "Copyright © 2006 Quest TM Magazine", Quest says:
This article may be reproduced online in whole or part if credit is given to both the author and Quest Magazine and a link is included to the web address from which the article was taken.
Articles on Wikipedia are constantly evolving. Requiring that an editor keeps track of what material comes from Quest and what doesn't, and requiring that the link always remains, is an unnecessary and unfair burden on Wikipedia editors. It implies that the article is owned by Quest and the author and can only be used under the above circumstances. In addition to unclear copyrights, it may violate Wikipedia's ownership policies (WP:OWN). Wikipedia articles aren't supposed to give credit to authors, just contributors.
Not only do Wikipedia editors have to keep track of the material and make sure that it doesn't violate Quest's rules, when the article is distributed through the GNU Free Documentation License, third-party groups may become liable if the article evolves to a point where the link isn't included, eventhough material from Quest remains. Forcing these third-parties to follow this unnecessary requirement is, again, asking for trouble.
Quest could potentially sue anyone who uses the article under the GNU Free Documentation License even if they were unaware that this problem existed.
--Nealparr (yell at me|for what i've done) 23:55, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
