It is very important that everyone working on Wikipedia respect copyrights. Since this is a wide-open project with no editorial oversight, this sort of thing will certainly happen again.
In our role as a provider of internet services, we have a fairly strong defense under the DigitalMilleniumCopyrightAct?, and a fairly strong responsibility. We can't be held financially liable for other people's actions, so long as we follow a reasonable take-down policy.
Nonetheless, I can tell you that my charitable instincts and love of knowledge will hit the wall if someone sues me. :-(
--JimboWales
Notice that I have added some more words at the bottom of the page when you go to submit. I think that the problem will mostly go away with this. People just need to understand that we don't want them to cut-and-paste from copyrighted sources!
There is no way to be 100% safe. But, hey, risk is a part of life. --JimboWales
Hmmmm - The only place I found that article exactly like that in its full length was on Ginger's site, in connection with her Wolf Cam. The first two paragraphs also appear in the same form in The Dog Owner's Guide, though the rest of that article is quite different. The author's name (Norma Bennett Woolf - can you believe that?) and copyright information appear at that site, including ways in which they will permit their material to be used. I donno if Ginger got permission or not. I did not find it on Nova (Jimbo's link) at all, tho there's alotta junk about wolves there. Ginger - did you simply contribute the article from your own page and forget that part of it was copyrighted?
AyeSpy
Actually I put it together from a few different sites. I was unaware of any copyright problems I was causing. I had never been to the pbs site Jimbo found the article at. I will be more careful in the future you can be sure. It is not my intention to cause problems for anyone and I feel badly about this.
WcGing
No need to feel bad. I'm all about the future, not the past. :-) Some of the paragraphs were exactly from the Nova site.
I encourage you, WcGing, to write a shorter article based on the knowledge you got from those articles...
We don't have to be particularly original, we just have to try to be correct, and most importantly of all, we can't give anyone an excuse to try to shut us down. So we have to put everything in our own words.
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