Ray Saintonge wrote:
The issue is one of free licensing. Under GFDL they have every right to use our material.
For us, it is an issue of free licensing. But in order to achieve any change in Baidu, we need to start out from a neutral point of view (NPOV) that is common to us and them. We might view Baidu as a surrogate of an encyclopedia in non-free country, but the owners are hardly marketing "Baidu, the non-free encyclopedia".
Further, I guess they are not very likely to post a policy stating "you are not allowed to copy material from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia", because then their users would start to ask "what is Wikipedia? why can I not access that website? is their content so good that the policy must warn against copying stuff from them?". The Chinese government has no direct interest to market themselves as non-free.
So, what could be a common point of view? I don't know, but freedom of speech or GNU's sense of freedom doesn't sound very likely. I guess one could start with "it is important for China to enjoy free trade, and thus to be a part of WTO and WIPO" and continue to "in order to comply with WIPO agreements, Chinese government owned websites need to fully respect the copyright of foreign works. Mechanisms for correcting copyright mistakes, such as taking down copyrighted material, have to be functional and efficient". In order to push such issues forward, I believe there must be some muscle in the shape of WIPO sanctions. But do we have that muscle? What do we know about WIPO? Do we need to join forces with others who might be fighting Chinese copyright violations, such as RIAA and Microsoft? This feels alien.