[Foundation-l] DMCA on Google

[Robert Rohde]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 3:01 AM, Jimmy Xu <xu.jimmy.wrk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> First of all, apologize for any inconvenience made by my poor English.
>
> I've found that Google sometimes delete some copyvio materials from
> its database per the DMCA <http://www.google.com/dmca.html>. And see
> <http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BD>, it's an article list of
> the copyvio ones in the "largest" Chinese encyclopedia, Baidu Baike.
> This kind of copying is blocking the development of Chinese Wikipedia,
> and some people even think that it's Wikipedia who copies.
>
> So can anyone tell me, is it possible to mail Google to let it remove
> these search results per its DMCA implement?

In principle it seems like it should be possible.  I don't know how
difficult it would be, or whether making the claim would be more
trouble than it is worth.  After all, we do generally want to
encourage people to reuse Wikipedia works.  We also want them to
properly follow the CC-BY-SA and/or GFDL.  I don't know the policies
of Baidu Baike.  If they fail to acknowledge when works are copied
from Wikipedia, then that is a problem, but the act of copying itself
is something we should encourage provided they are willing to provide
the appropriate attribution and copyleft acknowledgments, etc.  Has
anyone tried talking to Baidu Baike about that?

Regarding using the DMCA and other copyright enforcement mechanisms, I
will say that the only people empowered to make such infringement
claims are the specific authors of the article being infringed.  So,
for each article you wanted to take down, you would need to find at
least one major contributor to that specific article who was willing
to file the infringement claim.  Wikimedia is not generally empowered
to make such claims.

-Robert Rohde