[Foundation-l] Violations of Wikimedia copyright

Wed Mar 29 03:58:02 UTC 2006

I would like to know what the current policy is (if any) for people who 
are strongly suspected of violating copyright of content that was 
produced on Wikimedia projects.  I'm not talking about people dumping 
copyrighted content onto a Wikimedia project, but somebody thinking that 
the content is free and therefore is in the public domain and they are 
free to use it in any way they want.

I guess we should feel flattered that this is happening, and I'm going 
to give a specific example:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies

This Wikibook has been slightly modified and copied onto a number of 
websites, including some very commercial sites that are actually 
charging even for access to this content. See:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22During+an+unnamed+time+of+war%2C+a+plane+carrying+a+group+of+British+schoolboys+is+shot+down+over+the+Pacific.%22

This was marked as a copyright violation, and I think it is... of 
Wikibooks material.

What is interesting here is that it is not a wholesale mirror of 
Wikibooks (there are some of those), but rather a slight modification to 
the content and trying to pass it off as original compositions.  These 
websites are quite sleazy as well anyway, because they are selling term 
papers for lazy students, but it is still interesting that they would 
pick content that originated on a Wikimedia website.  As this Wikibook 
has been around for a couple of years and the full edit history is 
available to show each edit and change, I think it is obvious that the 
content was created at en.wikibooks originally, at least to veteran 
Wikimedia users.

I suspect this is going to be a larger problem in the future.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning