monniaux 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: French Court Detaches Itself From Reality, Demands Tabloid Turn Over 'Original' Topless Kate Middleton Photos

    monniaux ( profile ), 19 Sep, 2012 @ 10:51pm

    technicality

    Oh dear. It seems that quite a few people don't understand how these kind of magazines operate, at least in France.

    These magazines have a budget for paying damages and lawyers' fees (I believe the ?10000 are damages, not fine, but hey it's not like TechDirt articles were legally precise). If you're curious, purchase one of them, you're likely to see at some point some very bland and official text saying that the magazine was sued for infringing on somebody's private life and was ordered to pay damages and print the ruling inside the magazine (and sometimes on the cover, if the infringing pictures were printed on the cover). This is a NORMAL way of operating for them.

    Regarding the originals, the article makes it sound like the judge is some kind of simpleton, or still lives in the 1950s. I rather suspect this is a matter of legal technicality:
    * The magazine must be proposed with a way to make the trouble cease "in good faith" (hand over all "originals" and data for this picture and stop printing it).
    * The magazine must be presented with punishing damages should it reiterate its infringement.

    If you believe this is stupid, I invite you to read legal rulings in your own country; most likely they try to shoehorn current situations into century-old case law, and they contain technicalities because they have to.

  • On the post: French Author Plagiarizes Wikipedia; Does That Mean His Entire Book Is Now CC Licensed?

    monniaux ( profile ), 30 Nov, 2010 @ 05:24am

    not it's not like a GPL infringement case

    @Nick Cohglan: How would a publisher have to work out a deal with Wikimedia (the Wikimedia Foundation, I suppose) on works not copyrighted by Wikimedia?

    Besides, this is not like a GPL infringement case - we're dealing with literary work here, which a French court is likely to treat differently than code.

  • On the post: French Author Plagiarizes Wikipedia; Does That Mean His Entire Book Is Now CC Licensed?

    monniaux ( profile ), 29 Nov, 2010 @ 11:59pm

    what matters is that judges think

    I'm pointing out the obvious: what matters is not how commentators in this thread think, but how a French judge would react when faced with the claim that copying a few factual sentences from Wikipedia, even rewording them, would magically turn the whole Goncourt prize winner into a "free book". It seems highly implausible that the judge would agree with such a theory.

  • On the post: Perhaps Brain Surgeons Do Use Wikipedia…

    monniaux ( profile ), 05 Aug, 2009 @ 12:56am

    Re:

    Conventional news sources such as TV and newspapers are ridden with errors. The thing is, they don't admit so - they claim they are very reliable sources written by professionnal.

    In reality, much of the news is assembled from agency dispatches processed by interns or young inexperienced journalists. Journalists may be required to cover many topics, so a single journalist may cover "the reliability of Wikipedia" one day, and something totally different the other day.

    The amount of errors in science-related articles is staggering, with mistakes that would not be tolerated in highschool.

  • On the post: Wikipedia's Circular Logic Pops Up Again

    monniaux ( profile ), 13 Feb, 2009 @ 05:13am

    big problem with the media - information being copied around with no checking

    Same problem with journalism. Get a false news item into a newspaper, and, woah, it will be repeated elsewhere as fact. And when you wish it corrected and you contact the journalists, they'll point you to earlier articles.

    Problems could largely be avoided if the media took the academic habit of citing sources for their claims - which is possible with hypertext without using up space. Readers could then see that most news report are not original and are largely re-hash of newswires. Readers could see how two "independent" newspaper articles really took their information from one same Associated Press piece, for instance.

    "My professors insisted that we always verify our data by at least two sources that do not have a referential link (i.e. one article references the other in it's bibliography or quotes)."

    That's the main problem with today's press. The media largely copies fact from each other, with no attempt at independent verification. I've seen newspapers reprinting false information that would have been detected if only somebody there had taken the effort to launch a Web browser and run a Google search...