[Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol

[Mary Murrell]

It is not the case that you can't make money from a print version of something that is available on line for free. Case in point: philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an article in the 1980s in an academic journal. It eventually made its way to an unrestricted website where one could freely download it.  Nonethless, a publisher,  just a couple years ago, published the thing as a little book, with the same title and with not a single change, and it sold over 350,000 copies and got a huge amount of publicity for the author (and the essay). The title of the book/essay is On Bullshit. 

Of course, Cory Doctorow makes the same point about his own work, which he makes available for free on line.

--- On Fri, 8/1/08, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
From: George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Friday, August 1, 2008, 1:38 PM

...
The idea that "I have to license this to prevent (unnamed huge media
conglomerate) from making money off my Wikipedia article" is silly.
Someone trying to publish a print set of Wikipedia for normal print
rates would fail - it's free on the web.