Wikipedia takes the intellectual property of others seriously. We aim to produce a freely available work that uses a minimal amount of copyrighted material, in the case of text generally only clearly marked and attributed short quotations. We deliberately set the bar internally as more strict than US fair-use provisions, in order to be sure we are providing original writing produced by our volunteer editors.
As an open encyclopedia which can be edited by all comers, it is inevitable that some contributors will add material copied directly from copyrighted sources. We try to remove this material when it is pointed out. Some copyright violations are pointed out by the rights-holders, but most are spotted by our readers and volunteer editors. We have an organized system for reporting and resolving copyright issues, run by our volunteers. When editors are found to have committed a series of violations, we will often block them permanently from editing and/or open a Contributor Copyright Investigation, where we review literally every edit the contributor has ever made (sometimes tens of thousands) and try to identify and remove every copyright violation they have ever made.
A major obstacle for the volunteers who do these reviews is lack of access to print-only or paywall-protected sources. The proposed Copyright Investigator Login program is a cooperative program whereby rights-holders grant subscription or privileged web access to a limited number of Wikipedia volunteers who will use this access solely for the purpose of investigating possible copyright violations in our encyclopedia. Limited quotations from the copyrighted works may be used publicly on Wikipedia discussion pages to demonstrate violations in specific cases, and large portions of a copyrighted work may be sent privately to other investigators, again solely for the purpose of protecting the rights-holders and making sure our encyclopedia is as free as we can make it. We will not make publicly available substantial portions of any material accessed through these privileged channels. We look forward to your cooperation in this program.