Henning Schlottmann wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
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*.
They can't: They can't acknowledge that content came from a banned
source and they certainly won't adopt a policy of free licenses, not
even for a small part of their content. They want to own and control all
their content.
We're not asking them to acknowledge that it's from a banned site, only
that it's from Wikipedia. Wikipedia may in fact be banned but where is
there any acknowledgement from the PRC government that it is? Without
an explicit statement from them it's hard to view the banning as
anything other than a random act of bureaucracy.
Being so certain that they won't adopt free licences or that they want
absolute ownership prejudicially cuts out a lot of possible negotiating
positions. That hurts us more than it hurts them.
And I do not advocate to even discuss that with Baidu
- because if they
get under pressure, they will at best abandon the content. My position
is to keep that issue a low profile - essentially: ignore it - in order
to give the people in mainland China access to as much of our content as
possible, even for the price of breaking the law and the licenses. This
is a political decision.
That sounds a lot like the political decision of a certain powerful
government that refuses to speak with its enemies. By taking such a
hard line it manages to make things worse. Saying that we would be
giving them access to as much of our content as possible is questionable
when they can edit the material in a way that will best impose their
point of view. If Baidu is so distorting the information a high profile
is warranted to let the Chinese people know that they are not getting
the whole story. The law (whose?) and the licences are only a means to
the end of making knowledge available.
The management at Baidu is not important for our issue
at hand. The
three relevant groups are the authors in the zh-WP, individuals who copy
WP-content to Baidupedia and the general public in the PRC. Let
individuals take as much as they want and can safely use. Let them copy
it into Baidupedia. Let them do whatever necessary to get our content
inside the country. Let them use Baidupedia as Trojan horse. Screw the
license stuff. Getting information to the people - that's the mission of
Wikipedia. The license is just a means to that end, and could and should
be ignored where counter indicated by reality.
Your Trojan horse is full of dead soldiers.
PS: I'm from Germany. Almost twenty years ago, the
Berlin Wall and the
Iron Curtain fell. The dissident groups in East-Germany needed nothing
as much as information. Some Westerners smuggled political magazines
into the country. The western public TV-stations build antennas to reach
as much of eastern Germany as possible and had special shows that were
targeted at Eastern Germany. The smuggled magazines were given from hand
to hand and copied (by hand, no photocopy machines were available in
eastern Germany), the West-German TV-stations bought international
licenses only for their "own" audience in Western
Germany and broadcasted the content to East-Germany as well.
Your analogy would only be valid if the GDR government had been in
charge of making the copies of the magazine articles.
Ec