George Herbert wrote:
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Henning Schlottmann
<h.schlottmann(a)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.