On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 02:42:05PM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
You're not going to get any argument from Wikipedians against the philosophical and theoretical basis of what you just said. It was at least a year ago that I commented that the violation of Wikipedia copyrights will be a much bigger problem than violations by Wikipedians. It is relatively easy to develop policies to deal with the latter circumstances, and I think that what we have done is fairly conservative, meaning that we could probably have given ourselves a much greater benefit of the doubt.
The present problem will become more difficult as the years go on. To start with the violations will become harder to find, and will likely only be discovered as a matter of sheer luck. When we do discover them we need a strategy that will work. There is more to that strategy than trying to decipher legal texts. Assuming naïveté on the part of the violator is a good first start. A friendly letter of explanation suggesting possible solutions is a good first start, providing we at least give them enough time to respond. The amount of time should vary. If the violator has a site with many of our pages, it may suffice to see a steady progress in making the needed change.
A legal take-down notice is a logical second step, and the timing here will often depend on time limits provided in the law.
I agree with all this. I was looking at [[Wikipedia:Sites that use Wikipedia for content]] for the first time and I was surprised at the extent/number of sites that we *know* about and have issues. NationMaster (which has the entire wikipedia content) though listed as compliant violates the spirit of the license by putting the GFDL notice in an unreadably small font. 4reference, in spite of a letter and a warning, is not compliant (again entire wikipedia content). A lot of times I see 4reference copies of wikipedia articles ranked higher by google than the source article. I don't like this.
Another thing I noticed is that many (most?) of the sites violating GFDL don't know about it until we tell them about it. This is easily preventable and shouldn't be happening! I want to suggest a couple of things to ensure this:
* that we change the "From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" line. As we know very well when people see "free" they think gratis, not libre. I suggest we make it "From wikipedia, the open-content encyclopedia" with the word open-content linking to the copyrights page.
* at the bottom of each article we should remind people about their _obligations_ in copying it. Something along the lines of "if you wish to redistribute this article you must link back to this page and release it under the GFDL. See <here> for details" or something like that.
IMHO we should also be more vigorous in pursuing violators. Why are people saying this is antithetical to sharing? We are preventing them from *putting restrictions* on our free articles. Writing a legal notice is costly, that's a valid point. But we'll have to do it sometime, haven't we? Otherwise we lose credibility. And since we (presumably) have to write a template letter only once, the cost is amortized. I hope we never actually need to go to court. IANAL, of course.
Arvind