[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

[Dan Rosenthal]

I'd certainly ask for advice from counsel on this, but I would want to  
know: "given that Baidupedia is starting with GFDL content, does the  
fact that they obscure that their content is licensed under the GFDL   
prevent all subsequent derivative edits from also being unknowingly  
licensed under the GFDL?"

Essentially, if you are making a derivative work of a viral/share- 
alike/GFDL style content, but you do not know what the status of the  
original was (and did not agree to license your content under the  
GFDL), what is the copyright status of the newly created derivative  
work?

We'd need to know the answer to that question before doing a "reverse  
Baidupedia". If the answer is "It's under the GFDL" then we're ok to  
proceed (ignoring for a second the moral issues). If the answer is  
something other than that, we may not be able to do it.

-Dan


On Jun 13, 2008, at 3:42 PM, Ryan wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 1:38 PM, Dan Rosenthal  
> <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Complementary is only a step or two away from parasitic (such as  
>> their
>> relationship to us), but I too agree with this that where they have
>> worthwhile material that is something we can import under the GFDL,  
>> we
>> should do so. And if they don't like it, we can kindly point out that
>> they're doing the same to us but violating the license terms as well.
>>
>> -Dan
>
>
> I'm not sure that's morally correct.  I don't feel it's right to  
> release a
> Baidupedia contributor's edits under the GFDL when they didn't know  
> that the
> original material was available under the GFDL, or that their edits  
> would be
> released as such.  Of course, if Baidu agreed to use GFDL fairly, we  
> could
> use the edits legally, because Baidu presumably holds for itself  
> copyright
> to contributions.
>
> What also should be considered if we ever went down this road is  
> that we're
> not the only source they're "borrowing" from; apparently they're  
> also using
> other sources like the Chinese encyclopedia Hoodong, and we could
> inadvertently violate their copyrights by using Baidu's altered  
> versions.
>
> -- 
> [[User:Ral315]]
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