On 6/3/06, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2006/6/3, Anthony DiPierro
<wikilegal(a)inbox.org>rg>:
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