Without any explaination and announcement had Baidupedia changed its licensing policy (http://www.baidu.com/search/baike_help.html#n10). From my view point there are three major changes.

At first, instead of earlier, when you must search through many pages to find their copyright declerations and licensing policies now the licensing policy is directly linked at the bottom of every page.

The second change is in stead of earlier, where the licensing policy and the copyright declerations were seperated into at least two pages and one must puzzle together the often contradictory statements tother the new licensing policy is now concentrated on one page, but not less confusing, as I will state beneath.

The third change is that they now say that their licensing policy orient according to CC. But it does not say which CC. The text at this point is not understandable. It makes the impression as if the user can select between the different CC-policies, but actually the user can not. So actually there is no choice for that and none of their content page has any CC-declaration on it, except the well known © 2008 Baidu at the bottom of the page.

My *personnal* interpretation is that they say: Dear user, you can put any CC-licensed content on our page according to that license decleration. We support that license. But actually none of their user declare which license he or she want to use, or which license the content, which they had copy and pasted, use. So the whole thing has in the pracise no effect.

Everyone in the chinese community with whom I talked with say that they consider this as a farce. They think that Baidu just want to encourage its user to copy more content on their site by saying we support everything.

I myself take a slightly positive view. I think that Beidu is moving toward the right direction, even if the move has no effect at the moment. I cannot say why they introduced that peace of paper which is totally inunderstandable, by assuming good will I suggest that is because they are clueless and don't understand the cc-license. But I think at least formal they recognize that they have a problem and do try to resolve that problem. And I think that they are doing that also because of us. So I think that what we did in the past, complaining publicly and building up public pressure do show result.

So I think that we should continue or even increase this pressure. Suppose they really don't understand the whole licensing thing, I also think that it is our obligation to give developmental helps whereever we can.

Ting