On 6/3/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
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.
I think some things less drastic and cheaper than suing can be done:
- Officially but politely request that they take some simple, concrete
steps that we outline. Perhaps they're simply confused by the GFDL (understandable), and would comply if we told them exactly what we'd like them to do. Having a Chinese speaker to help with this might be useful.
- Failing that, somewhat more insistently note that this isn't an
optional set of steps, and mildly threaten to embarrass them publicly if they don't comply.
- Failing that, issue a short press release or open letter publicly
noting that they're violating the GFDL, to both produce some public pressure on them to comply, and at the very least to warn people about the nature of the project.
The only things needed for this are someone who can write Chinese and Wikimedia Foundation approval to send an official letter.
-Mark
I think that's reasonable (at least, other than the "threaten to embarrass them" part).
You are missing one necessary bit, though. Someone needs to decide what "simple, concrete steps" they need to take. Adding a notice that the work is released under the GFDL is certainly one, and arguably the only important one. In any case, the letter probably shouldn't state "you're OK if you do *this*" but rather "you're not OK if you don't do *this*".
Anthony