[Foundation-l] commercial use of wikipedia content

[Austin Hair]

On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 8:34 AM, Istvan Soos <istvan.soos at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm evaluating our legal options around commercially using wikipedia
> content, if this is not the right forum, please let me know / forward
> the question. It might be that the method I describe is not legally
> possible, so if there is any similar situation that does or does not
> work, please let me know either. I'd like to play safe in this field
> and avoid potential issues.
>
> For the sake of example we would like to automatically convert the
> page content to a different text and different format (e.g.
> automatically create text extracts and compile it into a pdf document)
> and sell it as part of a subscription service or even better as a
> standalone product. We include all the attributions / links wherever
> possible, and mark that the source of the product is Wikipedia. What
> else are we required to do before the sell can happen? Is there any
> fee or percentage that shall go back to mediawiki foundation in such
> cases? Can we restrict the copy or re-distribution of such product?
> For the later, I suppose there is nothing we can do, however this
> seems to ruin the whole business model, doesn't it?

Hi Istvan,

Others have already replied with answers to your specific questions,
but for a more detailed overview of Wikipedia's licensing terms, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights and associated
pages.  (This is an English Wikipedia page, but the information
generally applies to other languages as well.)

Austin