Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1506468-20190827123101/@comment-24894325-20190905084456

I usually think in terms of potential and actual threats to the wiki. But AeD's last comment presents another side of the same coin. Their question How do we know whether the rights were indeed secured? is very prescient indeed. Granted, in this specific case, many of the rightsholders take part in the debate and can set the record straight. But let us be clear that this is an exceedingly rare situation. Even so, not all rights holders are represented. For instance, we do not have a confirmation that Lance Parkin gave his permission. (To avoid the all too common misinterpretations of my words upthread, I do not assert that he didn't; I simply second AeD's point that we do not know whether he did.)

Let us now think of this in terms of the proposed policy: Every story posted by anyone on the Internet should be considered valid provided the proper rights have been procured. This places a burden of verifying whether the rights have been procured on us, on the wiki. I presented above some plausible scenarios how rights can be obtained, and I see no way for us to distinguish a situation where that happened from the one where the poster of a story is simply lying. We have neither the legal power, nor the legal wherewithal, nor the resources to fact check copyright claims posted by an individual on their blog. We cannot start harassing authors and their estates for a confirmation, nor should we.

In fact, the copyright laws are so complex (as we have already discovered in some past debates) that even authors and/or publishers themselves sometimes misunderstand which permissions were given and how far they extend. For instance, the already mentioned Hannah Hatt, the granddaughter of Mervyn Haisman, tried to stop the re-release of Downtime on DVD claiming the rights had been obtained only for straight-to-video release. Reeltime Pictures disagreed. (See details here.) Clearly, only one of them was right, making the other mistaken about the presumably written copyright agreement between them.

Thus, if a story is posted on the author's website with a note that the copyright has been obtained, this might even be true but not constitute a permission for a commercial release, in effect, equating it with J.K. Rowling's permission to pubish fan fiction as long as it is not commercial. (And she has successively sued fans for attempting a commercial release of something that had been freely available on the Internet.)

In summary, the idea of validating stories posted on websites would create a dangerous loophole in our validity rules, a loophole that can be either exploited as it stands due to the insufficient protections or circumvented due to the unenforceability of these protections.

It surprises me that this is being supported at all, with all the consequences being waved away as if we would not be responsible for them by creating this policy. But it surprises me even more that this policy is being pushed through and fast-tracked for the sole purpose of delivering three stories to the wiki approximately half a year earlier than would happen ordinarily (when they are published commercially in a book). This is risking long-term damage to the wiki and its reputation for negligible short-term gain.