Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-25372787-20150330175748/@comment-1267828-20150331154426

Situations regarding wikipedia and copyright is sticky at best. A lotof what is on wikipedia is often verbatim copying of author words, so they don't actually own the reference either.

Tupka is right, the best way to deal with this is to contact the admin team first, inform them, and move to staff as a last resort.

Additionally, as Tupka said, you need standing in order to make a claim regarding copyright. You have every right to inform the copyright holder that their information has been taken, but you yourself do not have the copyright and thus don't have standing which, in the legal world, as described by Legal Dictionary.com is "Standing, sometimes referred to as standing to sue, is the name of the federal law doctrine that focuses on whether a prospective plaintiff can show that some personal legal interest has been invaded by the defendant. It is not enough that a person is merely interested as a member of the general public in the resolution of the dispute. The person must have a personal stake in the outcome of the controversy." 

Personal stake is important. By personal stake, the legal world means "The outcome of the situation directly affects you, your life, and your property in regards to the case". (I wrote that definition, so no article to link). A good example of this is you may be personally outraged in dumping of waste in a lake, but if you live nowhere near said lake and cannot prove that the wellbeing of the lake affects your life, you can't do anything about it outside of rally the people who are affected to fix it, but if they don't want to, then you're sunk.

So while you are angry that the copyright is going on, you can't really stop it completely unless you get the copyright holder directly involved, or somehow convince staff to do something about it before it bites them.

Here is a brief summation of the wikipedia copyright section:

"The Wikimedia Foundation does not own copyright on Wikipedia article texts and illustrations.   It is therefore pointless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce articles or images, even if rules at your company or school or organization mandate that you ask web site operators before copying their content.

The only Wikipedia content you should contact the Wikimedia Foundation about is the trademarked Wikipedia/Wikimedia logos, which are not freely usable without permission.

 Permission to reproduce and modify text on Wikipedia has already been granted to anyone anywhere by the authors of individual articles as long as such reproduction and modification complies with licensing terms

 The text of Wikipedia is copyrighted (automatically, under the   Berne Convention ) by Wikipedia editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the public under one or several liberal licenses. Most of Wikipedia's text and many of its images are co-licensed under the   Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License   (CC BY-SA) and the   GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). Some text has been imported only under CC BY-SA and CC BY-SA-compatible license and cannot be reused under GFDL; such text will be identified either on the page footer, in the page history or the discussion page of the article that utilizes the text. Every image has a description page which indicates the license under which it is released or, if it is non-free, the rationale under which it is used.

The licenses Wikipedia uses grant free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and acknowledgment of the authors of the Wikipedia article used is included (a link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement; see below for more details). Copied Wikipedia content will therefore remain free under appropriate license and can continue to be used by anyone subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom. This principle is known as copyleft in contrast to typical copyright licenses."

So the people involved do have to technically put a link, but, once again, contacting the original authors is the only way wikipedia will do anything about it. They fully and blatantly admit to owning none of their articles wording whatsoever, just that the articles are under a license that allows for a LOT of freedom of use.

Hope some of this helps.

