Talk:Homicide (Canadian law)

Recent changes to sentencing for youth

I have just reverted some changes that were made yesterday to the sentencing of youth for murder. There were no edit summaries. None of the changes reflect what is in the actual sources. None of the changes reflect what is coming down in the Bill C-10 ammendments. I do not think the edits should be added back unless it can be explained why they are correct. Singularity42 (talk) 13:07, 18 April 2012 (UTC)

Response to copyvio concerns regarding the Criminal Code

User:LeadSongDog raised a concern on my talk page that by reproducing sections of the Criminal Code, there was a copyright violation. I have already responded on my talk page, but I thought I should mention it here as well. As already noted on the Department of Justice website, Canadian government laws and enactment may be reproduced without requiring permission, pursuant to the 1997 Reproduction of Federal Law Order. This order is compatible with WP:CC-BY-SA. Singularity42 (talk) 13:26, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

The problem we face is that the order which grants us permission to reproduce is conditional: "provided due diligence is exercised in ensuring the accuracy of the materials reproduced and the reproduction is not represented as an official version." If our text is not shown as an attributed literal quotation, we fail to meet that condition and so are in violation of copyright. Worse, subsequent editors have seen no problem with "improving" the text they did not know was a quotation. LeadSongDog come howl! 03:47, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

That's not how I read it at all. Basically, there's one of two scenario: 1) it is an exact copy of the text, which would otherwise be a copyright violation except that Canadian government enactments are exempt, or 2) the text is changed, in which case it is no longer a copy of the text and not a copyright violation (which would still require editors to be involved because the new text may not be supported by the sources in that scenario). In either scenario, there's not copyright violation. The fact that the exemption says that the text should not be represented as an official version I think speaks to this issue as well. Singularity42 (talk) 10:40, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi. :) User:LeadSongDog asked my input. In terms of Wikipedia, what we look at here is the copyright status in the United States. WP:PD notes that, "Under U.S. law, laws themselves and legal rulings also form a special class. All current or formerly binding laws, codes, and regulations produced by government at any level, including other countries’ governments, and the court opinions of any court case are in the public domain. [1] This applies even to the laws enacted in states and municipalities that ordinarily claim copyright over their work. The US Copyright Office has interpreted this as applying to all “edicts of government” both domestic and foreign." (Footnote omitted) From a copyright standpoint, we currently accept content that is public domain on Wikipedia even if it is copyrighted in its home country. That said, I would think it certainly is a good idea to mark content as a quotation if we don't want it to change, and Wikipedia:Plagiarism requires that we either do mark explicit copying as a cited quotation or that we use a general attribution note indicating that source content is copied. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 15:00, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Oh dear, that is a problematic situation. That means then that editors in that home country may not be able to lawfully edit the content, but those in the U.S. are? So much for "anyone can edit" and wp:WORLDWIDE. Thank you, though, for clearing it up. I suppose wp:Plagiarism is sufficient for this article's purpose. Complying with that will still have the effect of keeping this article legal in Canada. I'm also concerned as to whether wp:REUSE issues arise when non-U.S. based reusers of WP text have no way to identify content that is not explicitly flagged as subject to copyright outside of the U.S. LeadSongDog come howl! 16:57, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

I was about to add {{Citation-attribution}} to the references, when I noticed that the quote template had already been added to the wikicode, but the editor that did it put the sources in a seperate reference code instead of being a parameter on the quote template. I have taken the liberty to fix the parameters, which I believe now addresses everyone's concerns.

LeadSongDog, I certainly can't disagree with you that REUSE needs to be more clear. We have tons of content on our website that is not reusable in various locations for many reasons - sometimes copyright related and other times related to other laws, such as decency and limitations on political speech. (For instance, see a tiny bit here about the Indian map controversy). Our REUSE page at one point didn't even mention the possibility that text was used under fair use. Hmm. Maybe I'll put a few minutes into that now. (Sorry, copyright problems board! :D) --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 11:42, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

I've tweaked it a bit. Hopefully it will be somewhat more clear. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 11:54, 8 May 2013 (UTC)