Talk:Kyllo v. United States

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New York Times v sullivan

[edit] Review for possible COPYVIO

I found at least two paragraphs in this article that are verbatim to two in a Xanga blog by jrgini37 (this issue was raised by the Xanga blog author on the WP Hwlp Desk). The paragraph beginning, "For Kyllo, the result was tremendous . . ." was added to WP here on August 12, 2006; the one beginning "Kyllo was charged with growing marijuana in violation of federal law." was added here also on August 12. The key words used to identify the correlations are "tremendous" and "reflected", respectively. I also reviewed the sources for both documents and do not find common verbiage to easily explain the identical passages. Further review shows significant portions of the article are identical to the Xanga paper. In some cases, the new (verbatim) passages in the WP article replaced existing passages that addressed the same point, but with different word choice. I'm unfamiliar with how Xanga may maintain history, but the URL on jrgini37's blog entry appears to support that the entry was added almost a full year before the material in the WP article appeared.

There appears to be enough in question to warrant further investigation, so I added the copvio tag and placed an entry on Copyright_problems/2007_July_4/Articles. Comments from anyone who can shed further light on this are welcome. Thanks.
Jim Dunning | talk 14:40, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

I claim to be the author of the article, and have been asked to explain these similarities. I recognize my own writing style, and contend that the xanga.com article was taken from my edits. Because certain other stock phrases in this version of the article correlate with other WP entries I have written, I submit there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the article is an original creation of mine. However, I cannot reconcile the date on which I wrote the article with the date of the blog post. The person who flagged this text as a possible copyright violation has suggested that the blog host might not date its entries accurately, but this explanation seems unlikely here because the author of the blog entry claims that he made the entry on his birthday.

I'm not an expert in either American copyright law or Wikipedia's copyright policy. I do know that even unintentional infringement is a violation, and so it does me no good to say that I didn't know the text was already out there when I wrote what I wrote. Perhaps the best solution is to revert the article to its pre-violation version and allow someone else to write it. ---Axios023 00:36, 5 July 2007 (UTC)