On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 3:01 AM, Jimmy Xu xu.jimmy.wrk@gmail.com wrote:

Hello,

First of all, apologize for any inconvenience made by my poor English.

I've found that Google sometimes delete some copyvio materials from its database per the DMCA http://www.google.com/dmca.html. And see http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BD, it's an article list of the copyvio ones in the "largest" Chinese encyclopedia, Baidu Baike. This kind of copying is blocking the development of Chinese Wikipedia, and some people even think that it's Wikipedia who copies.

So can anyone tell me, is it possible to mail Google to let it remove these search results per its DMCA implement?

In principle it seems like it should be possible. I don't know how difficult it would be, or whether making the claim would be more trouble than it is worth. After all, we do generally want to encourage people to reuse Wikipedia works. We also want them to properly follow the CC-BY-SA and/or GFDL. I don't know the policies of Baidu Baike. If they fail to acknowledge when works are copied from Wikipedia, then that is a problem, but the act of copying itself is something we should encourage provided they are willing to provide the appropriate attribution and copyleft acknowledgments, etc. Has anyone tried talking to Baidu Baike about that?

Regarding using the DMCA and other copyright enforcement mechanisms, I will say that the only people empowered to make such infringement claims are the specific authors of the article being infringed. So, for each article you wanted to take down, you would need to find at least one major contributor to that specific article who was willing to file the infringement claim. Wikimedia is not generally empowered to make such claims.

-Robert Rohde