[WikiEN-l] GNU FDL infringement alert!

Tue Jul 8 15:51:37 UTC 2003

Oliver Pereira wrote:

>I've just discovered that a website called called "Malaspina Great Books"
>has "adapted" hundreds of our biographical articles and included them in
>their database. They claim copyright of this database ("This database is
>maintained by Malaspina Great Books 1995-2003") and make no mention of
>having released any of it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
>License. Clearly they are infringing the terms of the licence. What should
>we do about this?

The bios link to Wikipedia at their ends,
so I'd assume that they're acting in good faith.
We just need to point out to them
that they need to include a notice by each bio
indicating that it's released under the GFDL.
(They don't have to release their entire database,
but we could encourage them to do that as well,
giving their use of our biographies as immediate evidence
of the benefits of free content.)

>The Malaspina website is at: http://www.malaspina.com/

I found an interesting June 2 post in their guestbook
<http://www.iguest.net/cgi-bin/gb.cgi?user=greatbooks>,
where a visitor pointed out an error in Martin Heidegger's bio.
Like usual, that error remains uncorrected on Malaspina --
but of course it had been corrected on Wikipedia months before!
I posted a reply (from me, not from Wikipedia generally);
I also sent it to the email address given by the visitor.

>See also [[Talk:Galileo Galilei]], which is where I first noted the fact.

-- Toby