daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Of all the books to come out of print-on-demand, this one is possibly the most problematic. I am certainly not a lawyer but, as I see it, not only is it using the name of the Foundation without the explicit permission of the Foundation (and hence, in violation of our trademark), it is attributing the content to the Foundation. This, in turn, could make us liable for any copyvios in the book (text and images). Despite numerous requests from Print on Demand publishers (including Lulu), the Foundation has consistently avoided such an arrangement for precisely these reasons.
Furthermore, the content was developed as a result of a grant made to the Foundation with the stated goal of creating *free* content. After considerable discussions with them, we have made it clear that we intend to keep the books online and not take them to print. This is precisely what we said we will *not* do, and it is timed perfectly to coincide with negotiations to get a considerably larger grant from that same foundation to expand the Wikijunior project.
This is not commendable. It is the bad result of people acting unilaterally on behalf of the Foundation without fully understanding the implications of what they are doing.
Danny
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I have reviewed this website and it appears to violate the Wikimedia Foundation's trademark rights. I don't think the content is an issue, but the use of the Wikimedia Foundations trademarks and trading on the goodwill of the Foundation seems to impinge on its rights. We are also publishing College Level textbooks in Cherokee from Wikipedia content, however, we are not selling the textbooks, we are paying for the printings ourselves and donating the books to the Cherokee Nation language immersion programs and donating them to our schools of information technology.
Jeff