Wikipedia:Request for immediate removal of copyright violation

If you are the owner of content that is being used on Wikipedia without your permission, then you may request that the offending page (or page version) be immediately removed from Wikipedia.

To expedite this process you will need to provide some type of proof that you are the copyright holder. We certainly will not immediately remove anything without being reasonably sure that it is in fact a copyright violation.

All suspected copyright violations should be listed at Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements. Our policy page dealing with copyrights is at Wikipedia:Copyrights.

Alternatively, you may choose to contact Wikipedia's designated agent under the terms of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act.

Page histories

Note that Wikipedians do not have the ability to remove copyright infringements from an article's page history. Therefore, if you believe that material in an article's page history infringes your copyright, you should contact Wikipedia's designated agent, rather than using this page.

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Current requests

Issues which appear to have been resolved have been moved to Archive 1.

Historic list of members of the Privy Council

(Also daughter pages and possibly other pages?)

Transferred from User_talk:Andrew Yong:

Please explain to me and all other members of the Wikipedia community the reasons why you have flagrantly breached my copyright in the listings of Privy Counsellors since 1679. It is patently obvious to me (and anyone else who cares to look) that you have merely copied these listings from my web-page at Leigh Rayment's Peerage Page. You have not provided as far as I can see any attribution or credit for MY work and have attempted to pass these listings off as your own research. Please remove these pages immediately. Sea Lion]

Transferred from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Peerage:

Members of the Wikipedia community (and especially those who contribute to this page) will be aware of my page at http://www.angeltowns.com/town/peerage/. A number of people have been kind enough to say to me that they consider my page to be valuable to their work in this area. Although each of my pages has a copyright notice at the foot of the page, I am happy for the contents of my pages to be used,quoted or published by other people, PROVIDED THAT IN ALL SUCH CASES PROPER ATTRIBUTION/CREDIT IS GIVEN TO ME FOR MY WORK. I am however not prepared to accept wholesale breaches of my copyright - I stumbled across such a case yesterday and I am more than a little p*ssed off that this has occurred. I have added a post to the individual's talk page demanding that the offending pages be removed immediately. If this person had asked my permission to use my research prior to posting the offending pages, it would have been freely given, subject to proper attribution.

Some of you may be familiar with a practice long used by certain industries (especially by publishers of maps and street directories) of including, for example, a non-existent geographical feature on a map or a non-existent street in a street directory so as to be able to tell whether another company in a similar industry is merely stealing their work and passing it off as their own. Be aware that my pages follow a similar practice - somewhere in each page there is a hidden pointer which enables me to tell at a glance whether someone has stolen my work. In the case in point, the tell-tale deliberate error appears on the offending pages, something that would not happen if the owner of that page had done their own research instead of simply stealing mine. [Sea Lion]

Comment from me: I'm not sure why Mr. Yong has been singled out here. Most of the work on this was done by me. As such, I'd defend by saying that, as far as I have been able to tell by cross-checking, Mr. Rayment's work is based on publicly available reference works such as Complete Peerage, Burke's Peerage, and so forth (which are not, however, acknowledged), and takes the form of lists of officeholders. As such, I question the validity of the copyright claim. My understanding is that factual information cannot be copyrighted. At any rate, I would be happy to add credit to Mr. Rayment (although I'd be more comfortable with such a position if he himself gave credit to his own sources for the information he uses.) john k 03:52, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

What you have and what we have are both lists of factual information presented in chronological order. Both are thus not protectable under copyright law (see Feist v. Rural). Our list is also formatted in a different way than yours so how in the world can you claim that we even used you as a reference, let alone the allegation that we copied your work? You therefore have no right to demand anything from us. John - if you did not use this guy's work as a reference, then please don't list him as one. List the references you actually used. --mav 05:04, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Oh, didn't mean to be unclear - I did use his page as a reference. (and you can probably find on talk pages various mentions by me, Lord Emsworth, and others that we have used the page as a reference). When I have checked against other sources, though, such as Complete Peerage, it's clear that his work is based on those sources. john k 05:10, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Facts are not covered by copyright. The only thing that may be copyrighted here is the list in the format it appears. The list of Privy Counsellors differs substantially from Mr Rayment's list in terms of format, and to a degree in terms of content (note, for instance, that only years, and not exact dates are listed, that there is no "age" column, that the peers' ordinal numbers are provided, and so forth). Neither has information been unlawfully taken, nor has the format been reproduced; therefore, I don't believe that there is a copyright issue here. Now, that said, I would definitely agree that a reference to Mr Rayment's site is in order, as Wikipedia Policy requires one to cite one's sources. -- 10:48, Jun 14, 2004 (UTC)

In short: it would be best practice to list Mr Rayment's page (and others that have been counter-checked, such as Burke's &c.) as a reference source on any and all pages for which it has been used, but this it by no means a legal requirement, it being an ordering of factual information.
Next?
James F. (talk) 11:28, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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Since it's claimed there are tell-tale errors in the list, it would be valuable for someone familiar with the subject to go through the list, comparing it to a second external source -- that way, not only would the information be correct, but the claims of copyright infringment would be made moot. -- Seth Ilys 15:24, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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Notes on copyright and fact listings

Lists of facts cannot be copyrighted. Thier organisation *may* be. The law requires some *creative* element in the organisation of such material. This is a low requirement - but an essential one. Some methods of listing eg alphabetical order are now regarded scene a faire - material one would reasonably expect to be present. Listing of personages by date is also one such method.

The alleged(?) author above claims that the presence of deliberate mistakes in his work makes it copyrightable. The inclusion of *minimal* erronous material in such data does not protect the copyrights of the original author(s). This is a common and false assumption. The law only protects copyright infringment where there is *substantial* copying. If the listing contains (say) 1000 names of whom 999 are correct and one is an error even copying the entire listing is highly unlikely to be considered a violation of copyright.

The reasoning here is that the names and titles of the persons in such a list are *facts* and hence cannot be protected by copyright. A listing in historial order is *not* protectable because this falls under the scene a faire doctrine. 1/1000 entries is extremely unlikely to satisfy the de minimis criterion of the law and it might well be judged as falling under the "fair use doctrine".

The *correct* treament of such material is for the author to request that the infringing copyrightable materal *and only that material* be removed. This has the side effect in the instant case of improving the accuracy of the remaining material. It is the requestor's obligation to show that s/he holds the relevent copyrights to the data and explcitly identifies the violating material - excluding any uncopyrightable data. The requestor is exceeding his/her rights if s/he asks for a single line of unprotected material to be removed. To falsely claim copyrights is a federal offense in the United States and carries a jail sentence.

Underlying these 'alleged' copyright infringments there is frequently an underlying assmption that is false. Copyright law was not designed to reward anyone for work carried out by the 'sweat of the brow'. Copyright exists exclusively to protect the creative and novel element(s) in works whether or not they have any economic value of not. Attribution is *not* necessary if the material is not copyrightable. Nonetheless it is good manners to do so.

1 pound notes

I have uploaded an image of the front and of the back of what I think is a Series C Bank of England £1 note, but have now discovered I need prior permission, I am currently applying for permission to use these images in wikipedia, but my existing versions don't meet the requirements, so I request that they be removed in the meantime. They are Image:1pound note-back.jpg and Image:1pound note-front.jpg.

I don't know whether these would be allowed under "fair use" or similar, but if someone else wants to claim fair use, they could reupload them, so I see no reason not to allow the uploader to remove their mistake in uploading these. Angela. 18:15, Aug 21, 2004 (UTC)

• The Bank of England has very strict rules on the reproduction of their notes, we've been asked to take similar scans downin the past, one must ger prior permission to reproduce BoE notes. Boffy b 16:07, 2004 Aug 22 (UTC)

• Regardless of their rules i dont think they have a valid claim here, pictures of money are most defenetly fair use whatever the BOE thinks. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 12:41, 2004 Sep 12 (UTC)

• Images of paper notes are problematic because of the potential for forgery. If the image is of paper money currently in use it would be best to avoid posting it. The image itself is copyrighted by the Bank of England. Whether or not it can be enforced is another story. The laws of a country are copyrighted but the copyright cannot be enforced. This would certainly be an interesting case just to see the logic applied here: exactly who does own the money?
• Surely they can't object so long as the scan is of low enough a resolution as to be useless for printing?

There used to be a good site at www.rulesforuse.org covering copying of currency, but now it's gone. There might be useful information in the wayback machine at [1]. silsor 20:54, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)

Night and Fog Copyright Infringement

I am the author of the short article on Night and Fog (Nacht und Nebel) which appears on my site at shoaheducation.com/fog.html. I am the one who put a copy of the article on wikipedia, as a reprint, and thereby gave you copyright permission to use the material. Whoever complained is someone without knowledge of the material or copyright, and may be among those who have given difficulty over my site for several years for either personal or ideological reasons. In any event, you may check and see that I am the author andowner by going to the page above, or writing at ekbest@charter.net or shoah@charter.net. If you have a name who filed the complaint I would like to know, because they, and not wikipedia are committing the violation: it is against Copyright law also to interfere with an author's decisions regarding his or her own work or publication thereof: (Federal Copyright Act, 1976). In any event, Wikipedia in no way violated the Act, nor did I in reprinting my own material.

We recenty moved and had a foul up with our Charter service, which was supposed to keep the same account and did but then changed: a person named 'Brandt' also gave our current address to them, so it could have beensomeone trying to pull a switch. We have had trouble on our site with hackings and wrongful entries as well and even modifying of files: when we can trace it we do. Thanks for looking in to this. You did have full permission to reprint the file.

Cordially, Elizabeth Kirkley Best PhD ekbest@charter.net shoah@charter.net shoaheducation.com

The emails are the ones listed on the site.

Thank you very much for explaining this. I have restored your article, removed its listing from Wikipedia:Copyright problems and copied your explanation to Talk:Nacht und nebel. silsor 20:05, Oct 10, 2004 (UTC)

The suspected copyright violation was no doubt listed in good faith, since there was no way of telling who had copied the article from your site into Wikipedia. Usually these are acts of copyright infringement. silsor 20:07, Oct 10, 2004 (UTC)