Is GoogleTV violating Wikipedia's license? - Wikimedia-l

29 Aug 2022

Hi all,

I want to bring a legal concern here on Google's misuse of our content. [It came up
today on
Twitter](https://twitter.com/epineda/status/1564143156702199813?s=20&t=…
that the GoogleTV app had linked a movie description text in Catalan language (which in
principle it should be good news regarding language normalization). However, shortly after
a wikipedian colleague realised that the text was fully taken by the Catalan Wikipedia.
Once I downloaded the app by myself, I double-checked that Google does not specify
anywhere (or at least that I could find minimally visible) that those lines belong to
Wikipedia: neither the origin, the license, nor a link to the full article or to the CC
license.

I'd like to recall the licensing footpage on Wikipedia(Text is available under the
[Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
3.0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attri…)
and its conditions, as well as to ask others to check whether there's more situations
like this one. It's worth noting how wrong this is to minoritised language Wikipedias:
not only the legal issue itself, but also the lack of legitimate clicks and views that we
end up losing, the confusion and misunderstandings from the readers that think this is a
win by Google (the example I shared, with both screenshots enclosed), and even a
subsequent chicken-and-egg situation that can lead to deleted articles by some users
thinking that the content was stolen from Google and not actually the opposite.

I remember that there was a previous thread here, not so long ago, about the problems of
Google taking over our data and therefore diminishing clicks to the Wikimedia projects.
Considering that I am fully against the GAFAM-drift that the WMF is increasingly adopting
by benefiting from Google in our human, economical and digital structures, I prefer to
share it here as well -and not only to the legal team of the WMF (cced).

Kind regards,

Xavier Dengra