[WikiEN-l] Our content gets *everywhere*

[David Gerard]

On 20/08/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Why do you think it's such a bad idea?  I don't expect that the WMF
> would go mad starting lawsuits all over the place.  Most likely it could
> happen when there has been a serious corruption of the underlying
> copyleft principles by some person in the distant future.  It's a matter
> of looking ahead.  Individuals just do not have the clout to deal with
> serious breaches of copyright, and when their efforts are masked by a
> long series of subsequent edits the abusers can get around that by
> challenging the individual's right to litigate.  An infringement suit
> still needs to be preceded by a registration of one's claims.  How do
> you propose that such a registration be formulated?  Can one individual
> act on behalf of all the other individuals in making such a
> registration.  I think the WMF would do better periodically sending in a
> data dump of the entire site for copyright registration.


For an example of an unrepentant GFDL violator, look at Baidupedia.
We're dealing with them merely by Anthere publicly saying "this isn't
the right way to do it." And they could comply to the standard of
other mirror sites *really easily*. They don't even have to link back
to Wikipedia, they could just include dumps of the history page and
release their changes under GFDL. That would pass in any sensible
court, I'd think.

Note the way the FSF and gpl-violations.org do it - they don't seek
cash or takedowns, they seek *compliance*. Because compliance isn't
that hard and isn't that onerous. But people need to be helped to
understand copyleft and free content if they don't get it, and helping
them do that is thoroughly in line with the aims of the projects and
the Foundation.


- d.