[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

[Lars Aronsson]

Ray Saintonge wrote:

> The issue is one of free licensing.  Under GFDL they have every 
> right to use our material.

For us, it is an issue of free licensing.  But in order to achieve 
any change in Baidu, we need to start out from a neutral point of 
view (NPOV) that is common to us and them.  We might view Baidu as 
a surrogate of an encyclopedia in non-free country, but the owners 
are hardly marketing "Baidu, the non-free encyclopedia".

Further, I guess they are not very likely to post a policy stating 
"you are not allowed to copy material from Wikipedia, the free 
encyclopedia", because then their users would start to ask "what 
is Wikipedia? why can I not access that website? is their content 
so good that the policy must warn against copying stuff from 
them?".  The Chinese government has no direct interest to market 
themselves as non-free.

So, what could be a common point of view?  I don't know, but 
freedom of speech or GNU's sense of freedom doesn't sound very 
likely.  I guess one could start with "it is important for China 
to enjoy free trade, and thus to be a part of WTO and WIPO" and 
continue to "in order to comply with WIPO agreements, Chinese 
government owned websites need to fully respect the copyright of 
foreign works.  Mechanisms for correcting copyright mistakes, such 
as taking down copyrighted material, have to be functional and 
efficient".  In order to push such issues forward, I believe there 
must be some muscle in the shape of WIPO sanctions.  But do we 
have that muscle?  What do we know about WIPO?  Do we need to join 
forces with others who might be fighting Chinese copyright 
violations, such as RIAA and Microsoft?  This feels alien.



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se