[WikiEN-l] Systematic violation of the GFDL

Sun Sep 11 21:50:15 UTC 2005

I would suggest a friendly mail on copyright law and asking them to
properly contribute our text and ask permission from whoever else they
copied.

If they refuse, we can take it from there.

On 9/11/05, DF <dragons_flight at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It has recently come to my attention that the
> one-woman small-scale commercial website
> http://www.legendsofamerica.com/ has been copying
> paragraphs and entire passages from Wikipedia articles
> and dropping them into their own content, without
> attribution or GFDL release.
> 
> The initial discussion of this exists at Katefan0's
> RFA, after she was accused of copying this site's
> content when in fact it is now clear they have been
> copying from us:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Katefan0
> 
> I have spent a bit of time looking into this and found
> at least 5 cases of misappropriation in the 7
> historical articles I looked at from that site.  In
> some cases, there are minor changes to our text (e.g.
> NPOV -> "It's a great place to visit"), and in all
> cases the paragraphs that have been copied are
> surrounded by text and images that do not appear to
> have come from us.  What makes this worse however, is
> that in at least one case other passages in the same
> article were copied from yet another copyrighted
> online source without attribution.
> 
> This last feature suggests that even if this person
> were open to sticking a GFDL label on all her
> derivative works, that they would still be copyvios
> related to misappropriations from other sites.
> 
> Since this is a very small business, I believe it is
> at least concievable that the person in charge does
> not understand copyright law (mix and match from
> enough copyrighted sources and it becomes fair use,
> right?), though I am inclined to doubt that the
> average person would think it is okay to copy material
> without any attribution whatever.
> 
> The site boasts having more than 2000 pages of
> content.  Some of that is user submitted and fluff
> pieces, like ghost stories, that seem unlikely to have
> come from us.  But a large chunk is factual and
> historical content about the American Southwest.  If
> my informal survey is representative, we could be
> talking about dozens or even hundreds of pages with
> content copied from us.
> 
> Do people have any suggestions for how to pursue this?
> 
> -DF
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