[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

[Dan Rosenthal]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dan Rosenthal wrote:
>
> > But that's exactly what Baidupedia has done. The assurances to every
> single
> > person who has ever contributed to a WMF project are undermined as long
> as
> > Baidupedia uses our content while claiming it as their own, under
> copyright.
> > It is not copying. Copying would be merely them reusing the content. It's
> > their claim that THEY were the authors, that it belongs to them, that it
> is
> > something they could potentially sue you over. That is the theft; the
> theft
> > of the authorship and ownership rights of the Wikipedian who wrote the
> > content. It is fundamentally unacceptable that we support that.
>
> I may be grossly misreading what you just wrote above, or just not
> being well enough informed about all the statements about our
> licencing system on-wiki, but just to clarify; what precise
> "assurances" are you talking about?
>
> Yours,
>
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
>
>
> The assurances that I am talking about are the statements that "by clicking
submit you are agreeing to license your submission under the GFDL". The GFDL
requires attribution. By requiring that our contributors use the GFDL (or
CC-BY-SA, or any other attribution required license), we are giving an
assurance to our contributors that their work will remain attributed to
them, and if it is not attributed to them they shall have some sort of
remedies available to them.

By tacitly accepting Baidupedia's actions, we're undermining that assurance,
by saying "Look, here's a wide swath of our work that is NOT attributed, and
there's nothing that guarantees your work won't be included in it, and we're
not going to do anything about it".

That's a huge turn-off to potential contributors.




-- 
Dan Rosenthal