I disagree. Under our licenses, we require attribution for content. If
someone else takes my content and uses it without attribution, they are
saying it is theirs. That is theft. They have taken my intellectual
property, and claimed it as their own. That's entirely different than the
RIAA line, which says "If you download copyrighted music without paying,
that's theft". There is a HUGE difference between sharing copyrighted
content inappropriately, and claiming ownership and authorship of that
content. The latter is 100% unacceptable; the former at least has moral
arguments against it. I certainly am not a drinker of the RIAA kool-aid, nor
am I trying to equate it to criminal acts like larceny and the like. I am
trying to put it into perspective however; it's not something we should be
condoning or supporting. That's one of the benefits of having free content
-- to minimize the instances of copyright infringement. It's hard to
infringe on free content -- you have to actively try. So those who DO
actively go out of their way to take credit for what our contributors have
made, ought to be viewed in a stricter light precisely because of the
freedom of our content.
-Dan
On 6/12/08, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote:
This is a tired old canard.
Copyright infringement is *NOT* theft.
When you infringe someone's copyright you have duplicated what they have,
not taken it away from them.
For this very reason, the law views the two offences differently. If you
equate copyright infringement with theft, you've been drinking the RIAA
kool-aid.
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Dan
Rosenthal
Sent: 12 June 2008 15:19
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections
On 6/12/08, Henning Schlottmann <h.schlottmann(a)gmx.net> wrote:
Titan Deng wrote:
> We Chinese Wikipedians are now collecting Baidupedia articles which
were
copied
from Chinese Wikipedia.
What is all that copyright, lawyer, enforcement, loose face stuff about?
Last time I checked, Wikipedia was about disseminating free knowledge.
Unfortunately the projects are blocked by the Chinese government, so
people of the peoples republic have no access to our content, not the
the parts that are deemed dangerous by the government, not to the other
parts. Now someone takes at least some of the uncontroversial content
and makes it available by copying into Baidu.
Of course it would be nice if they would acknowledge the license and
give proper attribution. But they can't - Wikipedia is banned and they
can't name this source.
But as our mission is to distribute our knowledge, I believe this is the
second best way to distribute our articles, and the best available until
the forces that are open up the Great Firewall.
Ciao Henning [[user:h-stt]]
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Free knowledge does not mean that the information itself is unrestricted,
nor does it mean that the authors who make information free waive all of
their rights. We fundamentally require attribution to our authors under our
license. If Baidupedia is not respecting that, and are not in
compliance with the other terms of the GFDL, then it is very difficult to
say that they are working for the freedom of knowledge. Copyright
infringement != free knowledge. It == theft. By enforcing that other
websites respect the terms of the licenses our works are published under,
we
are actually furthering free knowledge by giving our contributors some
assurances that their work will be protected and not abused. I know that I,
for one, would have second thoughts about some of my contributions if I
knew
that it would be taken by another person and used under their name. That's
not free dissemination, its theft.
-Dan
--
Dan Rosenthal
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