On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 1:36 PM, Dan Collins en.wp.st47@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Wikipedia, Meet "Web 2.0", "Web 2.0" meet Wikipedia. Consider the amount of effort it would take to stopper the constant fountain of plagiarism and illicit copies (well meaning and evil alike) and then you'll understand Viacom's postion in Viacom v Youtube.
For whatever its worth I smacked the flag inappropriate content button on a bunch of the earliest (and worse) Wikipedia ripoffs and explained the problems. None of those have yet been removed.
I didn't go as far as filing a DMCA takedown as none of the earliest copies were my works, though some of the subsequent ones have been... but also because of Google's very NPOV phrased threat that your takedown would be listed at chilling effects and the idiotic PR debacle that would no doubt result. Kudos to them for providing DMCA takedown instructions which should result in legally valid takedown requests though...
If you're a substantial contributor to any of the copied articles and want to issue a takedown request I'd be glad to give you a hand in making sure your request is both properly formed, and less likely to create a storm of stupidity should it show up on chilling effects.