>On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 11:11, Brett wrote: > >> Pursuant to a rights owner notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright >> Act (DMCA), the Wikimedia Foundation acted under the law and took down and >> restricted the content in question. A copy of the received notice can be > >> Reverse engineering necessary to have open source in the brave new world? > >PCI spec docs (and many others) are copyrighted. Maybe they should be, >maybe they shouldn't, but they are. > >As far as I know, the actual specs cannot be copyrighted (or it's >murky), but knowing wikipedia, somebody probably copied an entire >table from the doc and dropped it into the article. that's a no-no, >and not something I'd find nearly as alarming as "censorship".
A DCMA notice is an improvement over the furious clean-up happening behind the scenes. For example: search for "CIPSO", a NetLabel protocol with an IETF RFC, the word appears 1263 times in Linux kernel 3.3. No Wikipedia entry but Linux_Security_Modules links to an ex-entry... without deletion log. Try the "Multi ADM" link on the same page: dead again, no deletion log. Hmm, the page was last edited yesterday. Date of its most recent reference? June 2010. Second most recent? 2006. If you're lucky you can come across "time travel" pages: a days-old edit using future tense to refer to events years in the past. Entrusting the very definition of reality to a bunch of LSD-dropping hippies is JUST NOT RESPONSIBLE :) -- p
