[WikiEN-l] An obscene example of remote loading

[Rob Church]

On 27/01/07, wikien-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org
<wikien-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2007 22:15:01 +0100
> From: "Oskar Sigvardsson" <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] An obscene example of remote loading
> If they follow the GFDL, then no. If they don't (which it appears that
> they don't, since they don't credit us; the history link doesn't
> work), we could sue, but really, do we even care that much?

If it's remote loading, as in, pulling content from our servers live,
then we *can* stop it, and such mirrors should be reported to us on
IRC in #wikimedia-tech (on Freenode, as usual) or else reported to our
mailing list at wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org.

Remote loading is not helpful for us; it creates a small amount of
additional, illegitimate load on our cache servers and it facilitates
loading the site into frames and so forth...this is not necessarily
illegal, but quite often, remote loading sites won't really care about
the GFDL and it becomes so.

Legitimate mirrors and people who want to reuse our content are free,
and encouraged, to download a database dump and process it for their
needs. There is also an OAI live repository service, which I think we
charge for (and I don't know how many parties actually use it).

If the licence our content is released under is violated, then
individual contributors to that content have a right to sue for
copyright infringement; Wikimedia doesn't actually *have* the
copyright and so may not be able to do the actual litigation (but I'm
not a lawyer, hate lawyers, and am not completely sure of that).


Rob Church