As others mentioned in the thread, WMF can't enforce this directly as it is not the copyright holder. However, in past instances, we have raised the issue with Google (similar to the KPN example) and will do so for this one as well.
I am meeting with Google later today and will flag this to remind them of the copyright obligations that come with using this text.
Thanks for surfacing this,
Nicholas
On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 12:58 PM wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: Is GoogleTV violating Wikipedia's license? (Peter Southwood)
- Re: Is GoogleTV violating Wikipedia's license? (Ciell Wikipedia)
- Re: [Small Wiki Toolkit] Writing Wikidata Queries Using WDQS Tool
Workshop On Tuesday, August 30th, 16:00 UTC (Seyram Komla Sapaty)
Message: 1 Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2022 11:18:53 +0200 From: "Peter Southwood" peter.southwood@telkomsa.net Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Is GoogleTV violating Wikipedia's license? To: "'F. Xavier Dengra i Grau'" xavier.dengra@protonmail.com, "'Wikimedia Mailing List'" wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 002201d8bc51$8963c6a0$9c2b53e0$@telkomsa.net Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0023_01D8BC62.4CF06730"
If I understand the CC-by-sa licence correctly, Wikipedia and WMF themselves do not own the copyright, it is owned by the contributors who created the text. They can take this up with Google, the WMF cannot. If you are one of those contributors you can approach Google as misusing your copyright.
Cheers, Peter
From: F. Xavier Dengra i Grau via Wikimedia-l [mailto: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org] Sent: 29 August 2022 19:00 To: Wikimedia Mailing List; legal@wikimedia.org Cc: F. Xavier Dengra i Grau Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Is GoogleTV violating Wikipedia's license?
Hi all,
I want to bring a legal concern here on Google's misuse of our content. It came up today < https://twitter.com/epineda/status/1564143156702199813?s=20&t=z2xu6PMB29... on Twitter that the GoogleTV app had linked a movie description text in Catalan language (which in principle it should be good news regarding language normalization). However, shortly after a wikipedian colleague realised that the text was fully taken by the Catalan Wikipedia. Once I downloaded the app by myself, I double-checked that Google does not specify anywhere (or at least that I could find minimally visible) that those lines belong to Wikipedia: neither the origin, the license, nor a link to the full article or to the CC license.
I'd like to recall the licensing footpage on Wikipedia (Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution... ) and its conditions, as well as to ask others to check whether there's more situations like this one. It's worth noting how wrong this is to minoritised language Wikipedias: not only the legal issue itself, but also the lack of legitimate clicks and views that we end up losing, the confusion and misunderstandings from the readers that think this is a win by Google (the example I shared, with both screenshots enclosed), and even a subsequent chicken-and-egg situation that can lead to deleted articles by some users thinking that the content was stolen from Google and not actually the opposite.
I remember that there was a previous thread here, not so long ago, about the problems of Google taking over our data and therefore diminishing clicks to the Wikimedia projects. Considering that I am fully against the GAFAM-drift that the WMF is increasingly adopting by benefiting from Google in our human, economical and digital structures, I prefer to share it here as well -and not only to the legal team of the WMF (cced).
Kind regards,
Xavier Dengra
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