[Foundation-l] (no subject)

[Robert Rohde]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Gregory Kohs <thekohser at gmail.com> wrote:
> To me, this smacks of an utter disregard for the intent and spirit of
> the free license.   It's the same sort of flippant administrative
> attitude that (nearly) allowed Guy "JzG" Chapman to grossly plagiarize
> my original, freely-licensed work, delete mine from the edit history,
> then prance about claiming that the work was his own, written "ab
> initio".  That made me want to vomit, and now I feel like vomiting
> again.
>
> Sorry to resurrect a thread like this, but I only became aware of the
> phenomenon recently.
>
> To give an example of how such a book is marketed on Amazon:
>
>>>>>>>>
> History of Buddhism (Paperback)
>
> by Frederic P. Miller (Editor), Agnes F. Vandome (Editor), John
> McBrewster (Editor)
>>>>>>>>
>
> These people are not Wikipedia editors.  Is it appropriate and/or
> legal under the terms of the GFDL or the CC-by-SA for a
> freely-licensed work to be "claimed" with a preposition such as "by",
> which by any interpretation of the English language in this usage,
> would connote authorship?  Personally, I don't think it is appropriate
> (thus that nauseous feeling I mentioned earlier).  But, I'm not a
> highly-paid lawyer, so maybe I just don't know better.  I've been in
> situations before where I know I am ethically correct, but helpless in
> the light of the law.
>
> It strikes me that this is something that Creative Commons or other
> organizations with Godwin-like attorneys should be aggressively
> pursuing, but we didn't hear from any of them in the original thread,
> did we?  Mike, could you illuminate this conversation with your
> professional opinion?

My gut reaction is that the copyright holders don't have an effective
case here.  Or more precisely, what defects may exist with respect to
licensing compliance are sufficiently minor that they could be
remedied by cosmetic changes that would not materially impact
Alphascript's apparent business model.

The marketing of these books is perhaps deceptive, even sleazy, but
the copyright licenses are essentially mute on marketing.  The only
substantive copyright issue is whether the named individuals can claim
to be "editors" for the assembled collection of articles used to
create the book.  My reading is that they almost certainly can as long
as the interior of the "book" acknowledges individual authorship for
each article.  Rather than turning to copyright law, one might
actually have a better chance of effecting change by complaining to
the FTC (or similar organizations) and trying to build a case for
deceptive business practices.  Even then, they could pretty much avoid
the deception charge just by updating their marketing to clearly
attribute Wikipedia as the source of their books, and then continue as
is.

At its core though, the fact that Wikipedia works can be repackaged
and sold is a feature of the free content movement.  If the
implications of that are sometimes disturbing then either we need
accept the unintended consequences as a necessary evil, or we need to
think of ways to tweak future editions of the license to address
problems that were not previously anticipated.

-Robert Rohde