Talk:The Road to Wigan Pier

Copyright

This article was previously trimmed by Antiquary to meet guidelines on copyright, but that good work has been undone by P17N167. ~ Ningauble 16:52, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I've decided to cut the Gordian knot here by simply reverting the additions. - InvisibleSun 23:52, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

REPLY

1. The FULL text of "The Road to Wigan Pier" is available to anyone who wants it, on the Internet, free of charge. (-See e.g. the links in the text on the full, careful version of the edit I keep trying to restore and which you're determined to keep in the trash can if you can get away with it.) Copyright isn't therefore a relevant issue in this particular case in my opinion (-as a UK lawyer, incidentally) - at least unless the owner of the copyright actually complains that Wikiquote's quotes are too extensive and that owner actually raises an objection. Presumably no one has actually objected, SO LEAVE IT ALONE AND STOP MEDDLING. As a matter of law, the owner of the copyright isn't suffering any loss or damage by extensive quotes being reproduced here if the owner of the copyright is presently waiving the copyright by allowing the whole book to be on the internet to anyone who wants access to the text anyway. Get it? (Putting this more simply, if the full text is on the internet elsewhere anyway, part of the text being on the internet here doesn't matter a jot unless the owner of the moral rights complains.).

2. As for your generously awarded praise of "good work being undone" in trimming, I drafted the original edit of this page a few years ago (under a different name) which involved far more painstaking "good work", which you people see fit to undo on your own whim - probably about a week's work while I was reading this book through a second time (if you look at the History page, you will be able to see how long that exercise took). You get people's time for free, and your greatest pleasure seems to be, to trash their hard work whenever you feel like it. That's why I don't bother contributing to Wiki publications any more - you show no respect for other people's hard work, and you think you know best when actually too often you don't. Good people stop bothering with Wiki once they find that their work is consistently treated with contempt. You don't deserve their time for free, and if you had to pay for that time, you'd show a great deal more respect than you Wiki people do. There are too many fools doing your monitoring job and they are given far too free a hand to do whatever they like. The result is arbitrariness, anarchy, bad decision making, and a huge waste of human resources internationally (i.e. billions of man hours wasted, around the world). P17N167 19:54, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

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The question of copyright doesn't appear to be as clear-cut as you have presented it here. The site you refer to has a disclaimer saying that Orwell's works are in the public domain. Likewise, the Wikipedia article on Orwell states the following: "Peter Davison's production of the Complete Works of George Orwell, completed in 2000, put most of the Orwell Archive in the public domain." On the other hand, the Wikisource page on Orwell states the following: "Works by this author published after 1923 remain protected under United States copyright law until 1 January 2021."

You have mentioned that we needn't bother with copyright concerns until someone objects. Actually, someone has already objected: namely, the Wikimedia Foundation, which in September 2008 proposed that Wikiquote be disbanded because it was full of copyright violations. They decided against disbanding us only because we had already begun a project to trim articles for copyright concerns. The French version of Wikiquote had previously been shut down for a year over copyright problems. It is not, I would suggest, good policy to wait until someone sues us before we get our act together. We had other reasons for trimming articles as well, but copyright is the question at hand here. For the time being I have placed this article under sysop-only protection for two weeks (on the grounds of edit-warring) until we hear what others might have to say in this matter. - InvisibleSun 00:01, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

I suspect the Wikipedia article doesn't mean what it appears to say. I posted a request for clarification on its talk page. I put no credence whatsoever in claims made by a famous-dead-person.org domain registered to a company nobody has heard of.

I sincerely appreciate the sense of frustration expressed above. However, due to the ad hominem form of expression, I endorse the edit-war protection for a cooling-off period. ~ Ningauble 18:53, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

"Orwell was right: Socialists don't care about the poor, they just hate the rich."

It says that "The last sentence, compressed and simplified, could be the source of this statement: "Orwell was right: Socialists don't care about the poor, they just hate the rich.""

Does anyone know the origin of this variation?, I looked on Google and the earliest use of it I could find was in Twitter post by Carl Benjamin (link here), and should it be added to the misattributed section on Orwell's main page?