[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

[George Herbert]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Henning Schlottmann
<h.schlottmann at gmx.net> wrote:
> Dan Rosenthal wrote:
>> This may be a cultural difference between you and I then. In the U.S.,
>> intellectual property is property.
>
> This issue is not about the law - it is about politics. The law is
> perfectly clear. But the true question is:
>
> Do we want at least some of our content to be distributed to mainland
> China so much, that we accept it is done by breaking the law?
>
> And of course no one can stop an individual contributor to zh-WP from
> suing Baidu in any legal system and country, where Baidu has assets, for
> infringing his or her copyright. But posters in this thread repeated
> demanded that the Foundation get active to support the claims of
> individual authors.
>
> For one, this is not possible under the current license (and any planned
> revision I have heard of). And: I don't think it would be wise, because
> I prefer getting at least some of our content inside the country over
> not getting it in and supporting starving IP lawyers.
>
> The Great Firewall is a fact. And insisting on license issues and
> attribution would unfortunately be playing the game of the powers that
> are in the Peoples Republic. Because that would prohibit the people
> there from accessing even the noncontroversial content, that was
> available to them, because someone considered the distribution of
> knowledge more important then IP law. I think it is a safe bet, that
> Baidu will not attribute the content to Wikipedia authors and will not
> put parts of their system under the GFDL.
>
> And beyond the issue at hand: There are so many infringing mirrors out
> there, that a service in China that hosts a bunch of non related
> articles copied by individuals is insignificant.
>
> Ciao Henning

You're setting up a false dichotomy here.  The options are not "Allow
Baidu to do whatever they want" and "Deny China any access to
Wikipedia articles", with nothing in between.

Baidu could entirely credibly copy or mirror over Wikipedia articles,
with GFDL and author history, just as easily as their users cut and
paste now.  If the political situation is such that they can't grab
"the whole set" of wikipedia articles, that's unfortunate, but doesn't
prevent them from taking a subset *under the licenses and with
credit*.

We *can* and should ask them to put proper licenses and copyrights up.

We *should not* try and force them to take down the articles.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com