First of all, I believe that plagiarism is when you claim you created something, but you did not. For example if you say, “I wrote this,” but you really copied it from Wikipedia. You don’t even have to explicitly claim it’s yours. Not citing your sources could be enough to mislead your readers and therefore is plagiarism. Usually plagiarism and copyright violation go hand-in-hand, but not always.
Here’s a good example:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
To claim to have written that is plagiarism. However, since the copyright has expired it is not copyright infringement to post it here, on my website, or even printed in a book of famous opening lines–I could even charge money for the book and not infringe. In fact I can copy the whole chapter, or the whole book, legally. But if I claim it as my own people will universally recognize me as a loser, liar, and wannabe wordsmith.
Oh man is that ever wrong. Sure, you can probably hastily apologize and remove the material to avoid getting sued, but not getting sued is probably as much because lawsuits are a hassle and not because you are innocent. If you’d made money off the infringement the true copyright holder might decide they are entitled to some of that money. It has nothing to do with, “I didn’t know.”
Let’s say that instead of Wikipedia, it is a book of public domain art you buy from the bookstore. You use the art on your site, the art turns out to be copyrighted, are you really liable for damages?
Or, you buy a stereo on eBay and it turns out to be stolen. Do you owe someone a new car window?
Now, let’s say a you meet a guy in a dark alley to buy 20 flat screen televisions at greatly reduced prices. Ok, now you are pretty much an accomplice.
My contention is that Wikipedia is closer to the bookstore end of these extremes.
I am not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt. Perhaps someone with more legal experience could further clarify the issues.
Good question. The art may be public domain, but those particular photos of the art might be copyrighted. I say “might not” because I think there needs to be a uniqueness factor for a work to be copyrightable.
You lose the stereo, and if you don’t have proof you bought it, you could face criminal charges. That the transaction took place on e-Bay is probably enough proof. As for what you paid, you need to deal with the seller to try to get your money back. In a criminal case the worth of the car window is usually not an issue.
Exact same issue as buying goods on e-Bay. The dark alley setting is not necessarily proof you knew the TVs were hot. Heck, lots of retail outlets have their receiving dock located in a dark alley. But if the transaction did not take place anywhere near your receiving dock and was of a nature that your suspicions should have been aroused, then I suspect the authorities will use the circumstances to make their case against you.
The information on Wikipedia is published under [U]the GNU Free Document License[/U]. There are two problems with this. The first is that you cannot use their text unless you also release your resulting document under the same license. The second is that if one of the authors of the Wiki page you copied did not have permission to use what they posted (they stole it) then neither you nor Wikipedia has the right to publish it. Now Wiki might get away with it, or at least not be slammed with a big lawsuit, because they are considered not-for-profit and an educational resource. But if your use is for-profit you could get hammered. Having advertising on the page might be enough to be considered for-profit use.
Unlike stolen goods, enforcement of copyrights is usually done under civil law rather than criminal law, so it’s up to the original copyright holder to either sue or not. If they perceive that you’re making money off their intellectual property they will be more motivated to take action. It doesn’t make any difference that you thought the material was okay to use or not.
Let’s say you’re a publisher of technical books and you want some original artwork for the cover of a book. You commission an artist and in due time they deliver the art. You print up tens of thousands of copies and put them in the channel and they are selling well. Everything looks peachy. Then some guy pops up and claims the cover art is his original work. A little investigation reveals your “artist” actually downloaded the art from this guy’s deviantArt account. So the true artist sues you for some crazy amount like $2 per book, but doesn’t bother to sue the “artist” you hired because you’re the one with the deep pockets. Your best bet is to negotiate with the true artist, then turn around and sue your hired “artist” to at least get back the fee you paid them. The contract you had with your “artist” should contain the necessary clauses to make your suit against them a cakewalk (they breached your contract when they used non-original material).
In this example that you purchased the stolen artwork in good faith and had no clue it was stolen, will in no way absolve you from liability to the true artist.
If you want public domain content for AIDS and you are a U.S. Citizen, I would go to a .gov site and use that content in a way that is modified to avoid the search engines’ duplicate content filter.
It sounds like you just don’t want to research and write your own content. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that. So put an ad in the marketplace section and hire someone, and get the writer to sign a legal document that their work is not plagiarism and is not from wikipedia and if it is they agree to bear the consequences.
Sites like Wikipedia where almost anyone can update the content displayed are more likely than regular sites to be displaying stolen content. I know of many people who are constantly having to issue copyright violation notices to Wikipedia in order to have their stolen content removed from the site. Just because the site is not for profit doesn’t exclude them from being taken to court for copyright violations. That they are not for profit doesn’t mean that their displaying someone else’s content hasn’t caused the owner to lose income through their theft. The biggest difficulty with something like Wikipedia is policing all of those updating the site to ensure that they don’t post stolen content.
The web now provides automated processes that make it relatively easy to locate stolen copies of your content and so the likelyhood of content thieves being found out is becoming far more likely than it was in the past.