Owning a paragraph and being allowed to publish it on Wikipedia are two different rights, and the gap between them deletes more corporate drafts than any dispute over notability. A firm can hold full copyright over its own homepage and still watch the identical sentence, pasted into a new article, vanish within the hour.
The deletion runs under criterion G12, unambiguous copyright infringement — one of the few speedy criteria a single administrator can apply without opening a discussion first. It exists because Wikipedia's text carries a specific license, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, alongside the older GNU Free Documentation License, and both grant something most corporate copyright notices withhold on purpose: the right for anyone to copy, modify, and resell the material, including commercially, forever, with only attribution owed in return. Holding the copyright to a sentence says nothing about whether that sentence has been released under those terms. Almost none has.
Reviewers rarely sit the source website next to the draft to catch this by eye. New Page Patrol and Articles for Creation both run submissions through Earwig's Copyvio Detector, which checks a page against the open web and returns a percentage match against the closest hit. A draft that scores high against a company's own site gets tagged, and often deleted, before the submitting editor sees anything resembling a rejection notice. Copyright removal is treated as standing legal exposure, not an editorial judgment that waits for a second opinion.
Rewriting the paragraph doesn't clear it on its own. Wikipedia's guideline on close paraphrasing catches text that keeps a source's sentence structure and word choices while swapping in a synonym here and there — the kind of edit a thesaurus produces, not an independent editor. Clearing the standard means building the sentence from the underlying facts, not rearranging someone else's phrasing of them.
A verbatim match proves one thing: nobody independent has written this sentence about the subject yet. It says nothing about whether anyone should.
Two paths actually clear a copyright tag, and only one of them is fast. The first is to stop translating the company's own copy and write new sentences from the sources doing the independent reporting — the same coverage the notability guideline already asks for, repurposed as raw material for original prose instead of a paste target. The second is to release the specific text formally, through the Wikimedia Foundation's volunteer permissions process, known as VRT. An authorized representative emails a license grant from an address that ties back to the company, a volunteer works through the queue, and only after the ticket clears can the exact wording go up — assuming a reviewer doesn't then flag it as promotional on its own merits, which happens often enough to matter.
Most companies that write in about the deletion assume the fix is proving they own the words. The fix is releasing them, or not needing to: writing the entry the way an outside observer would, from what independent sources already established. That version tends to survive review for reasons that have nothing to do with who holds the copyright.
