[Foundation-l] Alphascript Publishing: 1900+ copy&pasted books from Wikipedia

[David Goodman]

I would be exceedingly uncomfortable with us organizing a negative
campaign against any publisher not actually violating our copyright.
.  A factual campaign, providing information is another matter. It
would be entirely appropriate for individuals, even in a somewhat
coordinated way, to add a review, just pointing out that it is
entirely a copy of a Wikipedia article, and available free in  an
updated version from our website--and in updated form.


David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Joshua Gay<joshuagay at gmail.com> wrote:
> When I worked for the FSF I helped to run a campaign against the
> Amazon Kindle (and, DRM in general). We did an action called "The
> Kindle Swindle" in which we asked people to tag all DRM ebooks and the
> kindle itself with the tags "kindle swindle" and "DRM".
>
> People went ahead and tagged close to a thousand products with the
> term "Kindle Swindle" and the Kindle advice was tagged with that
> phrase close to 400 times making it become one of the top four tags on
> the Kindle page.
>
> What is kind of neat is that for each tag-term has its own discussion
> forum. The "Kindle Swindle" tag has a relatively active set of
> discussion threads [1], and the original comment I wrote [2] has over
> 250 replies to it.
>
> I imagine some combination of blogging, tagging, and letter writing
> could help in some way to increase consumer awareness and this kind of
> work can be done in a distributed fashion by wikimedians worldwide.
>
> footnotes
> :[1] http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle%20swindle?ref_=tag_dpp_cust_itdp_t
> :[2] http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle%20swindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx9U9IIOS8R4U3&cdThread=TxEMQ1LM199AP8&displayType=tagsDetail
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Renata St<renatawiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It was raised before on the Village Pump, but I think this is so disturbing
>> that we ought to do something.
>>
>> "Alphascript Publishing" has published over 1900 (and counting) books, all
>> available on Amazon. Prices range from $31 to $179. All of these books are
>> simple computer-generated copies from Wikipedia and (at least according to
>> one Amazon reviewer) couple other public domain websites. Trouble is, from
>> book description page there is absolutely no way of knowing that the book is
>> a Wikipedia mirror on paper. At least several Amazon buyers have been
>> fooled. What really gets my blood boiling is that Amazon user "VDM Verlag
>> Dr.Müller" (I think someone exposed him as 100% shareholder of the
>> publishing co) goes on rating these products as "five star"....
>>
>> The publisher seems to observe the copyright (even includes full edit
>> history) so legal action seems impossible. Someone already contacted Amazon,
>> but they "are not responsible for the quality of books sold". In the
>> meantime the number of such books grew from 900 in June to almost 2000 as of
>> today... I think we should do something. At the very least publishing
>> product reviews warning that what this is....
>>
>> See:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PrimeHunter/Alphascript_Publishing_sells_free_articles_as_expensive_books
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)/Archive_20#The_Alphascript-Amazon-Wikipedia_book_hoax
>> http://rufftoon.livejournal.com/59337.html
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Renata
>>
>> P.S. on a happier note: half of Wikipedia editors now can claim to be
>> "published authors".
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>
>
>
> --
> I am running the Arizona Rock'n'Roll marathon with Team in Training.
> Help me reach my fundraising goals:
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>
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