Barbara Page, a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar and Wikipedian in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh, has written a blog post[1] for Wikipediocracy about how the Amazon Echo's Alexa assistant reads out Wikipedia articles in response to queries. This includes queries that do not specifically ask for Wikipedia information.
What's the deal with the CC licence here?
To quote from the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence identified at the bottom of each English Wikipedia page,
If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, *You must,* unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), *keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work*; and (iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author").
Some similar services preface their Wikipedia readings with "According to Wikipedia, ..." This is at least a minimum amount of attribution. While I am not a legal expert, I guess it could be construed as an attempt to comply with the "reasonable to the medium or means" passage above. It also tells the user where the information comes from, which is useful from the standpoint of transparency.
But the Amazon Echo appears to include no attribution whatsoever when providing Wikipedia-based answers. On the face of it, this would seem to violate the terms of the Creative Commons licence (as well as obscuring the origin of the information provided). Am I missing something?
Has this ever been the subject of discussions, agreements or understandings between Amazon and WMF?
Best, Andreas