David Gerard said:
++++++++++++++
2009/8/13 David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com>:
I would be exceedingly uncomfortable with us organizing a negative campaign against any publisher not actually violating our copyright. . A factual campaign, providing information is another matter. It would be entirely appropriate for individuals, even in a somewhat coordinated way, to add a review, just pointing out that it is entirely a copy of a Wikipedia article, and available free in an updated version from our website--and in updated form.
"The contents of this book are reprinted from Wikipedia. Thanks to Dr --- for making Wikipedia content available commercially in printed form, in full observance of copyright requirements. We do this to spread knowledge, after all!"
- d.
+++++++++++++++
And David Gerard also says:
=============== 2009/8/14 Renata St <renatawiki at gmail.com>:
As long as the books give sufficient indication that they are from Wikipedia, ...
Inside the book -- yes, plenty of indication about copying. But nothing to warn you before you buy. People are buying these books tricked into thinking it's an original content.
Yuh. Point it out in reviews etc.
- d. ===============
To me, this smacks of an utter disregard for the intent and spirit of the free license. It's the same sort of flippant administrative attitude that (nearly) allowed Guy "JzG" Chapman to grossly plagiarize my original, freely-licensed work, delete mine from the edit history, then prance about claiming that the work was his own, written "ab initio". That made me want to vomit, and now I feel like vomiting again.
Sorry to resurrect a thread like this, but I only became aware of the phenomenon recently.
To give an example of how such a book is marketed on Amazon:
>
History of Buddhism (Paperback)
by Frederic P. Miller (Editor), Agnes F. Vandome (Editor), John McBrewster (Editor)
>
These people are not Wikipedia editors. Is it appropriate and/or legal under the terms of the GFDL or the CC-by-SA for a freely-licensed work to be "claimed" with a preposition such as "by", which by any interpretation of the English language in this usage, would connote authorship? Personally, I don't think it is appropriate (thus that nauseous feeling I mentioned earlier). But, I'm not a highly-paid lawyer, so maybe I just don't know better. I've been in situations before where I know I am ethically correct, but helpless in the light of the law.
It strikes me that this is something that Creative Commons or other organizations with Godwin-like attorneys should be aggressively pursuing, but we didn't hear from any of them in the original thread, did we? Mike, could you illuminate this conversation with your professional opinion?
Greg
These people are not Wikipedia editors. Is it appropriate and/or legal under the terms of the GFDL or the CC-by-SA for a freely-licensed work to be "claimed" with a preposition such as "by", which by any interpretation of the English language in this usage, would connote authorship? Personally, I don't think it is appropriate (thus that nauseous feeling I mentioned earlier). But, I'm not a highly-paid lawyer, so maybe I just don't know better. I've been in situations before where I know I am ethically correct, but helpless in the light of the law.
It strikes me that this is something that Creative Commons or other organizations with Godwin-like attorneys should be aggressively pursuing, but we didn't hear from any of them in the original thread, did we? Mike, could you illuminate this conversation with your professional opinion?
Greg
What can Creative Commons or Wikimedia do in these cases? They aren't the rights holders, so even if they wanted to they couldn't sue. And if they could sue, they couldn't afford it. Legal remedies are available to the folks whose work is included, but I think generally speaking they may not have much motivation or means. Wikipedia content is reused all across the web and in print without the type of attribution required by the GFDL - this is nothing new.
Nathan
On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Gregory Kohs thekohser@gmail.com wrote:
It strikes me that this is something that Creative Commons or other organizations with Godwin-like attorneys should be aggressively pursuing, but we didn't hear from any of them in the original thread, did we? Mike, could you illuminate this conversation with your professional opinion?
Greg
The free software foundation is very nice about GPL violations: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/lu-13.html
So what happens when the GPL is violated? With software for which the Free Software Foundation holds the copyright (either because we wrote the programs in the first place, or because free software authors have assigned us the copyright, in order to take advantage of our expertise in protecting their software's freedom), the first step is a report, usually received by email to license-violation@gnu.org. We ask the reporters of violations to help us establish necessary facts, and then we conduct whatever further investigation is required.
We reach this stage dozens of times a year. A quiet initial contact is usually sufficient to resolve the problem. Parties thought they were complying with GPL, and are pleased to follow advice on the correction of an error. Sometimes, however, we believe that confidence-building measures will be required, because the scale of the violation or its persistence in time makes mere voluntary compliance insufficient. In such situations we work with organizations to establish GPL-compliance programs within their enterprises, led by senior managers who report to us, and directly to their enterprises' managing boards, regularly. In particularly complex cases, we have sometimes insisted upon measures that would make subsequent judicial enforcement simple and rapid in the event of future violation.
In approximately a decade of enforcing the GPL, I have never insisted on payment of damages to the Foundation for violation of the license, and I have rarely required public admission of wrongdoing. Our position has always been that compliance with the license, and security for future good behavior, are the most important goals. We have done everything to make it easy for violators to comply, and we have offered oblivion with respect to past faults.
This is a bit different than liberating software for personal or small commercial use. This is roughly equivalent to someone printing out britannica articles and selling them for 20-150 quid
________________________________ From: "jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com" jamesmikedupont@googlemail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, October 13, 2009 11:07:34 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] (no subject)
On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Gregory Kohs thekohser@gmail.com wrote:
It strikes me that this is something that Creative Commons or other organizations with Godwin-like attorneys should be aggressively pursuing, but we didn't hear from any of them in the original thread, did we? Mike, could you illuminate this conversation with your professional opinion?
Greg
The free software foundation is very nice about GPL violations: http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/lu-13.html
So what happens when the GPL is violated? With software for which the Free Software Foundation holds the copyright (either because we wrote the programs in the first place, or because free software authors have assigned us the copyright, in order to take advantage of our expertise in protecting their software's freedom), the first step is a report, usually received by email to license-violation@gnu.org. We ask the reporters of violations to help us establish necessary facts, and then we conduct whatever further investigation is required.
We reach this stage dozens of times a year. A quiet initial contact is usually sufficient to resolve the problem. Parties thought they were complying with GPL, and are pleased to follow advice on the correction of an error. Sometimes, however, we believe that confidence-building measures will be required, because the scale of the violation or its persistence in time makes mere voluntary compliance insufficient. In such situations we work with organizations to establish GPL-compliance programs within their enterprises, led by senior managers who report to us, and directly to their enterprises' managing boards, regularly. In particularly complex cases, we have sometimes insisted upon measures that would make subsequent judicial enforcement simple and rapid in the event of future violation.
In approximately a decade of enforcing the GPL, I have never insisted on payment of damages to the Foundation for violation of the license, and I have rarely required public admission of wrongdoing. Our position has always been that compliance with the license, and security for future good behavior, are the most important goals. We have done everything to make it easy for violators to comply, and we have offered oblivion with respect to past faults.
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On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Gregory Kohs thekohser@gmail.com wrote:
To me, this smacks of an utter disregard for the intent and spirit of the free license. It's the same sort of flippant administrative attitude that (nearly) allowed Guy "JzG" Chapman to grossly plagiarize my original, freely-licensed work, delete mine from the edit history, then prance about claiming that the work was his own, written "ab initio". That made me want to vomit, and now I feel like vomiting again.
Sorry to resurrect a thread like this, but I only became aware of the phenomenon recently.
To give an example of how such a book is marketed on Amazon:
>>
History of Buddhism (Paperback)
by Frederic P. Miller (Editor), Agnes F. Vandome (Editor), John McBrewster (Editor)
>>
These people are not Wikipedia editors. Is it appropriate and/or legal under the terms of the GFDL or the CC-by-SA for a freely-licensed work to be "claimed" with a preposition such as "by", which by any interpretation of the English language in this usage, would connote authorship? Personally, I don't think it is appropriate (thus that nauseous feeling I mentioned earlier). But, I'm not a highly-paid lawyer, so maybe I just don't know better. I've been in situations before where I know I am ethically correct, but helpless in the light of the law.
It strikes me that this is something that Creative Commons or other organizations with Godwin-like attorneys should be aggressively pursuing, but we didn't hear from any of them in the original thread, did we? Mike, could you illuminate this conversation with your professional opinion?
My gut reaction is that the copyright holders don't have an effective case here. Or more precisely, what defects may exist with respect to licensing compliance are sufficiently minor that they could be remedied by cosmetic changes that would not materially impact Alphascript's apparent business model.
The marketing of these books is perhaps deceptive, even sleazy, but the copyright licenses are essentially mute on marketing. The only substantive copyright issue is whether the named individuals can claim to be "editors" for the assembled collection of articles used to create the book. My reading is that they almost certainly can as long as the interior of the "book" acknowledges individual authorship for each article. Rather than turning to copyright law, one might actually have a better chance of effecting change by complaining to the FTC (or similar organizations) and trying to build a case for deceptive business practices. Even then, they could pretty much avoid the deception charge just by updating their marketing to clearly attribute Wikipedia as the source of their books, and then continue as is.
At its core though, the fact that Wikipedia works can be repackaged and sold is a feature of the free content movement. If the implications of that are sometimes disturbing then either we need accept the unintended consequences as a necessary evil, or we need to think of ways to tweak future editions of the license to address problems that were not previously anticipated.
-Robert Rohde
2009/10/13 Gregory Kohs thekohser@gmail.com:
These people are not Wikipedia editors. Is it appropriate and/or legal under the terms of the GFDL or the CC-by-SA for a freely-licensed work to be "claimed" with a preposition such as "by", which by any interpretation of the English language in this usage, would connote authorship? Personally, I don't think it is appropriate (thus that nauseous feeling I mentioned earlier). But, I'm not a highly-paid lawyer, so maybe I just don't know better. I've been in situations before where I know I am ethically correct, but helpless in the light of the law.
I think, from past experience, this may be a failing of Amazon (etc) and not necessarily the result of any malfesance on the part of the publishers, annoying little sods though they are.
The title page - I haven't seen one, I confess - probably has something like "edited by Smith, Jones, etc." under the title. Here, they're just stating the defensible (if, as we've discussed, somewhat misleading) claim of editorship. In cataloguing parlance, this is the "statement of responsibility" - the verbose description of who's responsible and what they did. When you properly catalogue a book, you would make two entries; one is the statement of responsibility, and one is simply a list of named individuals in that statement.
a) edited by Susan Smith, with foreword by Charles Clark.
b) Smith, Susan / Clark, Charles
Bookseller data tends to be of the form of (b) - a list of entries in a field - and not verbose like (a), though it's common to have them expanded with notes like (editor) (translator) etc.
So, Amazon would take b), and turn it into:
"by Susan Smith (editor), Charles Clark (foreword)"
simply by tidying the list up and putting "by" at the front to make it human-readable They're the ones interpolating the "by" here; the original data probably never had it.
[It's actually worse on the main search, incidentally - there, it's just "by X", and the (editor) note is dropped entirely]
This is, annoyingly, one of those things that it would probably be relatively easy for Amazon to fix - code the system up so that "by X, Y, Z" becomes "edited by X, Y, Z" when all of X, Y and Z are noted as editors. Beats me where you file a bug report with them, though...
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