2008/7/28 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Amazing how the Knol, hailed as a competitor to Wikipedia, has so quickly began stealing content from Wikipedia's contributors, faking the license terms, and essentially plagiarizing en masse.
To be fair, contributors to Knol have done that, not Knol itself. Google have not done anything to encourage this kind of copyright violation, as far as I know (they haven't have a chance to do anything to stop it, but presumably will soon).
Youtube suggests not. Outside wikipedia "web 2.0" doesn't care about copyright
It happens with pretty much anywhere which is open to public text addition. Scribd for example. For the most part we don't notice because google search and yahoo have pretty strong duplicate content penalties in their search programs (otherwise all you would see is wikipedia mirrors in many search results). for the moment cuil.com doesn't appear to do so to the same extent.
How exactly this will impact depends to a large degree on how google applies it's duplicate content penalty to knol.