User talk:BrianFlemming

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Hello BrianFlemming, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and vote pages using three tildes, like this: ~~~. Four tildes (~~~~) produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome! --Courtkittie (talk) July 30, 2005 (UTC)

The God Who Wasn't There

I've noticed your comments on Talk:The God Who Wasn't There. You say you're the director of the movie and that you put the text quoted into the public domain. Well that's fine but we take copyright seriously on Wikipedia so we need a bit more assurance than the word of someone who typed the words "BrianFlemming" as his username into a browser window--I don't mean to impugn your honesty, but the face of the matter is that I don't have any way of knowing that you are Brian Flemming. If you've made a declaration placing the text into the public domain, and it's on a website registered in your name or controlled by you, please let's see it, or failing that we could perhaps make a fax arrangement.

Our practice on discovering a suspected copyright violation is to list it as Doc Glasgow did. He was following our policy and those who called him a vandal were wrong. We're not doing this for religious reasons, I'm an atheist and I don't know or care what he is. We're just doing it to make sure that the work of creative people is respected and not used without permission.

If we don't get the permission, it isn't a big deal. The normal practice is to rewrite the article from scratch to purge any copyright violations. The existing article can be used as a reference for this, as long as the resulting work is in no way derived from the original. The original is then deleted to purge our database and the rewrite is moved into its place. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 22:47, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

I hear you, Tony. I did provide a link to this page. It has a clear disclaimer. Also, I suggested that I be contacted through the film's official website. As a free-culture activist I find this really frustrating. I put information into the public domain. And then someone disingenously claiming to try to protect my copyright was believed without any further research. The allegation was false from the start, and there was little evidence to support it. There should at least be a requirement that someone reporting a copyvio try to contact the alleged owner and get a response. Finding a website where similar text is also posted should not be enough. That in and of itself doesn't come close to demonstrating a copyright violation, especially with the popularity of Creative Commons licenses and the like. The presumption of a violation on such scanty evidence is a bad policy. I mean, can I go to The Passion of the Christ entry and make it disappear with a copyvio allegation because of the unauthorized use of the POTC poster? Does someone then have to go get a notarized letter from Mel Gibson or Icon Productions to bring the entry back up? --BrianFlemming 03:26, 1 August 2005 (UTC)