George Herbert wrote:
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.net wrote:
I think it is a safe bet, that Baidu will not attribute the content to Wikipedia authors and will not put parts of their system under the GFDL.
You're setting up a false dichotomy here. The options are not "Allow Baidu to do whatever they want" and "Deny China any access to Wikipedia articles", with nothing in between.
According to Titan Deng, that's what the zh-Wikipedians demanded.
Baidu could entirely credibly copy or mirror over Wikipedia articles, with GFDL and author history, just as easily as their users cut and paste now. If the political situation is such that they can't grab "the whole set" of wikipedia articles, that's unfortunate, but doesn't prevent them from taking a subset *under the licenses and with credit*.
They can't: They can't acknowledge that content came from a banned source and they certainly won't adopt a policy of free licenses, not even for a small part of their content. They want to own and control all their content.
And I do not advocate to even discuss that with Baidu - because if they get under pressure, they will at best abandon the content. My position is to keep that issue a low profile - essentially: ignore it - in order to give the people in mainland China access to as much of our content as possible, even for the price of breaking the law and the licenses. This is a political decision.
The management at Baidu is not important for our issue at hand. The three relevant groups are the authors in the zh-WP, individuals who copy WP-content to Baidupedia and the general public in the PRC. Let individuals take as much as they want and can safely use. Let them copy it into Baidupedia. Let them do whatever necessary to get our content inside the country. Let them use Baidupedia as Trojan horse. Screw the license stuff. Getting information to the people - that's the mission of Wikipedia. The license is just a means to that end, and could and should be ignored where counter indicated by reality.
Ciao Henning
PS: I'm from Germany. Almost twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain fell. The dissident groups in East-Germany needed nothing as much as information. Some Westerners smuggled political magazines into the country. The western public TV-stations build antennas to reach as much of eastern Germany as possible and had special shows that were targeted at Eastern Germany. The smuggled magazines were given from hand to hand and copied (by hand, no photocopy machines were available in eastern Germany), the West-German TV-stations bought international licenses only for their "own" audience in Western Germany and broadcasted the content to East-Germany as well.
Illegal? Sure - but it helped at least a tiny bit.