On 6/3/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2006/6/3, Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org:
But I don't think it's worth the Wikimedia Foundation spending its time or money on, from a cost/benefit analysis. In fact, I think it's questionable whether or not it would be beneficial at all to sue Baidu over this. The only thing I see them doing *really* harmful is that they're censoring content, and this is perfectly legal under the terms of the GFDL anyway (I suppose Wikipedia could add an invariant section ranting about Chinese censorship, but it's not going to happen).
I see that somewhat different - if Baidu would be convinced to adhere to the GNU/FDL, anything changed on their site could also be back-imported into the Chinese Wikipedia. If this is going to be a big thing that might be a big plus for us as well.
Well, I don't see incorporating Baidu's changes into Wikipedia to be a good thing. It would be impossible to automate because so many of their changes are negative, and if you're going to import the changes manually you might as well change the wording while you're at it and avoid any copyright problems. (Also there's the fact that Wikipedia would have to start complying with the GFDL, but let's ignore that one.) And in any case it is a hypothetical - we could always wait until Baidu actually *does* add useful content and *then* decide whether to sue them.
Besides, the way I see it backporting could be done anyway. Or do you think Baidu is going to sue the Wikimedia Foundation?
Anthony