I'd certainly ask for advice from counsel on this, but I would want to know: "given that Baidupedia is starting with GFDL content, does the fact that they obscure that their content is licensed under the GFDL prevent all subsequent derivative edits from also being unknowingly licensed under the GFDL?"
Essentially, if you are making a derivative work of a viral/share- alike/GFDL style content, but you do not know what the status of the original was (and did not agree to license your content under the GFDL), what is the copyright status of the newly created derivative work?
We'd need to know the answer to that question before doing a "reverse Baidupedia". If the answer is "It's under the GFDL" then we're ok to proceed (ignoring for a second the moral issues). If the answer is something other than that, we may not be able to do it.
-Dan
On Jun 13, 2008, at 3:42 PM, Ryan wrote:
On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 1:38 PM, Dan Rosenthal swatjester@gmail.com wrote:
Complementary is only a step or two away from parasitic (such as their relationship to us), but I too agree with this that where they have worthwhile material that is something we can import under the GFDL, we should do so. And if they don't like it, we can kindly point out that they're doing the same to us but violating the license terms as well.
-Dan
I'm not sure that's morally correct. I don't feel it's right to release a Baidupedia contributor's edits under the GFDL when they didn't know that the original material was available under the GFDL, or that their edits would be released as such. Of course, if Baidu agreed to use GFDL fairly, we could use the edits legally, because Baidu presumably holds for itself copyright to contributions.
What also should be considered if we ever went down this road is that we're not the only source they're "borrowing" from; apparently they're also using other sources like the Chinese encyclopedia Hoodong, and we could inadvertently violate their copyrights by using Baidu's altered versions.
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