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FYI:
Copyright issue?
If you are coming to open a discussion with me because I reverted an edit of yours as a copyright issue, please make sure your post includes a link to the article in question - not just the name of the article, a link. Then read the following:
I typically use an edit summary with "copyright issue re URL", or "cv URL". The URL identifies source material that matches your edit too closely.
Copy Within Wikipedia
If you added material to an article which came from an existing article in Wikipedia, it is highly likely that this will be flagged as a potential copyright violation in our CopyPatrol software.
If you followed the best practices at Wikipedia:Copying_within_Wikipedia, you left an edit summary indicating the source, I will mark it as acceptable, and you are probably not reading this message. On the other hand, if you did not identify what you did in an edit summary, then I probably reverted the edit. However, the indicated source URL will not be the Wikipedia article, it will be be some site that copied from Wikipedia. (As a technical point, this is not a false positive because failing to follow best practices means that the attribution requirements have not been followed.) If the edit has been revision deleted, let me know so I can reverse it and you can provide the proper attribution. If it was not revision deleted but simply reverted, feel free to undo my revert, explaining carefully in the edit summary why you are doing so and add the proper attribution.
Other issues
There are other reasons why your edit may have been reverted in error. I do a lot of reviews of flagged issues. In 1 to 2% of the cases, I do make a mistake and I'm happy to rectify it. Some sources of errors:
Source page which has a full copyright notice at the bottom of the page but material within the page is properly licensed. Sometimes that license is buried in the page and sometimes on a separate page.
Source material that is public domain but not clearly identified as such.
Source material that is properly licensed but I somehow failed to notice the license
In any of these cases, politely let me know and I will remedy this situation as quickly as possible.
Thank you for flagging the copyright violation. I agree with the removal. However, there was other content that was removed that did not come from the website you flagged. This included infobox additions, a new section, and other text in the introduction not related to the vision/mission paragraphs.
I have reintroduced these elements onto the page. I will leave mission/vision absent.
COI on my profile. Happy to add elsewhere if needed.
While it may not seem like the right thing to do, it is convention, when identifying a copyright issue, to do a rollback, which sometimes picks up other copyright issues and sometimes picks up inrelated,a nd non-problematic issues. You are always welcome to restore the non-copyright issue edits.
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Thank you for reaching out to be regarding deleting that paragraph about Sky getting the rights to the ATP and WTA series.
I was really struggling to try to avoid a copy and paste of Sky Sports' press release and I did manage to change some of the wording but I accept the reasons why you ultimately felt it necessary to delete the information. This information does need to be included so if you can send me the copy of the text I used and put it into my sandbox I can modify it further over the next month prior to returning this information to Wikipedia ahead of Sky taking over these rights. Rillington (talk) 10:07, 30 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I temporarily restored the visibility of the text so you can access your edit. After you have done so, I can reset the revision deletion. Thanks for understanding. S Philbrick(Talk)13:08, 30 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your note. Unfortunately, this appears to be more complicated than you suggest. Before getting into the specific issues, I will make a general comment, which reflects my general understanding of copyright rules. I won't speak for others working in this area but I hope we are on the same page. Material on pages created by the federal government is almost always public domain. There are some exceptions but as a general rule, if it's on a federal government website it can be treated as public domain. Some editors have mistakenly jump to the conclusion that government documents are always public domain. (This is a general comment, I'm not addressing this at you personally.) It is not uncommon to have to revert material that comes from a state government website. Most of the material on state government websites is not public domain. There are some specific exceptions, for example text of legislation, but in general one has to be very careful when using material from a state website.
In this specific case, you are using material from a state of Massachusetts website. I believe the source is the following site:
You identified a Harvard site commenting on the status of copyright for Massachusetts government records. While that page starts out very encouragingly:
The Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth has said that "Records created by Massachusetts government are not copyrighted and are available for public use."
It does go on to state
The scope of this statement is not completely clear.
This is not unique to this site but is very frustrating to those of us working on copyright issues. Over 99.9% of the time, if you see an unequivocal copyright statement at the bottom of the page with no caveats, you can assume that the material is subject to full copyright. In a tiny percentage of cases such as this one, there will be another page somewhere, sometimes easy to find, sometimes not so easy, that basically says our unequivocal declaration of copyright was just kidding, the situation is somewhat different. (As an aside, Wikipedia could provide a service they could use some of their stash of cash to send out useful information indicating that it would be better to have clearer statements of copyright on pages.)
The terms of use page you linked is helpful but still challenging to read.
It starts out fairly definitive:
All of the material posted on the Commonwealth's websites and available to the public without use of an authenticating and authorizing mechanism (such as a "PIN" or password) is public record.
That sounds crystal-clear. They use the term "public record" rather than "public domain", but I think for copyright purposes those terms are interchangeable, and a reader could be forgiven for reaching this sentence and thinking that anything on mass.gov is free to use.
However, the very next sentence starts out with a qualification "most of the public record posted on Commonwealth websites…" They then go on to talk about material that can only be used under "fair use". They also mention social media pages with comments, which is available under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. That's not the same as public domain, but can be used in Wikipedia with attribution. However I'm not going to focus too much on these issues as there is a more important qualification:
Please note that the Massachusetts Judicial Branch has its own Terms of Use and Site Policies that apply to its pages on Mass.gov.
I'm presuming that a page about the Chief Justice falls under this qualification although I'm not completely sure.
Unfortunately, I'm running out of steam and we aren't quite done.
While it seems logical that a page about the Chief Justice would fall under the Massachusetts judicial branch rules, I don't know that for certain. Moreover, I haven't search for the page outlining their own set of rules.
I think the next steps are that you should investigate whether the page about the Chief Justice falls under the general Mass.gov rules or the exception for specific judicial branch rules. If the latter, we will want to look at that page, if the former will want to look and be sure that the content does qualify as public domain.
(talk page stalker) From what i can tell the important sentence on the Mass.gov Terms of Use is: most of the content on Mass.gov, the Commonwealth forbids any copying or use other than "fair use" under the Copyright Act. This means that most content on mass.gov is Non-free content, which means that Wikipedia:Non-free_content#Acceptable_use#Text is the guideline that applies. Especially the part that says: Brief quotations of copyrighted text may be used to illustrate a point, establish context, or attribute a point of view or idea. ... Extensive quotation of copyrighted text is prohibited. I don't know how the draft looked like but i hope this helps @Sphilbrick. Nobody (talk) 15:55, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the ping, Sphilbrick. I'm going to comply with 1AmNobody24 here. If I can recall (I can't remember correctly what the draft looked like, as that draft I tagged for G12 was deleted over a month ago), the draft did not use the non-free content in an acceptable condition, and I also remember there was also a high similarity percentage according to Earwig's Copyvio detector that I used prior to G12-tagging, which, is an unacceptable use of non-free content as well. TailsWx16:48, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I do apologise for using copyrighted material (as I had saved it off a Salvage Corps/Fire Patrol only Facebook group a week ago and did not know if it was copyrighted. (Yet the sources that I had used had the images (which I should have credited anywhom so that's a fault by me))
I have only come here if you could kindly revert the changes as the new additions on the page for Glasgow Salvage Corps were no easy feat. It took me quite some time researching them (as Glasgow Salvage corps is not as popular as Liverpool or London)
It would be most helpful if you reverted it, and I could remove the copyrighted image so people don't miss out on an (I'd like to call it) awesome part of English/Scottish Fire History. Not much is known about them as they were not as common as your normal Fire Service in the UK.
Many thanks, You have saved me time with having to redo the entire thing again. Ill make sure to keep it out (or email the sources when i find them again) once I finish copying it over. FireBrigadeFanaticNO1 (talk) 19:16, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.
You deleted all my updates.
There was nothing of any Copyright value.
All updates were from publicly available sources.
And more to the point, most of my update was reformatting.
I responded on your talk page (FYI you did not Ping me when you responded to me so I didn't know about your post until you came to my talk page) S Philbrick(Talk)18:09, 7 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am curious about this edit, which added as a reference what now appears to be a paywalled site. I ask because we are preparing to disambiguate the term "Yelo", but also because it is unclear how this reference applies to the content of the preceding sentence. I thought you might have some insight into that. Cheers! BD2412T17:14, 27 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry I wish I could help. I see that yet it is my only edit to that article. On occasion, I have undertaken to improve references to articles but they are typically articles in which I have personal interest, and this doesn't that criteria. I do see that it is pay walled I wonder if it was pay walled at the time. I tried accessing it and failed. S Philbrick(Talk)17:33, 27 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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Good day, I see that you've uploaded this file as fair use together with a VRT ticket number. Possible to verify if the license is ok for commons? --Min☠︎rax«¦talk¦»02:37, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately, I have no specific recollection of this action. I was active in VTRS (then OTRS) at the time but I no longer an active there and do not have access. The situation seems puzzling on its face. Generally speaking, the use of a nonfree logo is to meet certain criteria as spelled out on the talk page, but that can be done without permission. The point of permission is to get an acceptable version so that it does not have to be nonfree. Sorry, you will have to track down an agent who can look at the ticket. S Philbrick(Talk)12:59, 27 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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