[Foundation-l] Finding copyright violations with CopyScape tool

Sun Aug 24 07:08:26 UTC 2008

(NOTE:  I have absolutely 0 relation to anyone at CopyScape or have
any interest in the financial situation of the company)

Hey everyone,

Well a few years ago I used to use [[Copyscape]] at
http://www.copyscape.com/ to help me find copyright violations on new
Wikipedia pages.  Basically, you input a URL and it scans the internet
for other copies of all or parts of that text. It's a pretty awesome
tool - try it out (try somewhere other than Wikipedia, explained
below).

It is a paid tool; it costs $0.05 per search.  However, they had
Wikipedia whitelisted to be free of charge.  However, I recently tried
to use it again and it turns out that they no longer whitelist
Wikipedia addresses.  Basically, it had become so popular with
Wikipedia patrollers that they were getting bogged down.

I emailed the people in charge of the site and this is what they had to say:
"We're huge fans of Wikipedia and would love to whitelist it. In fact, we
were doing this for a while, but we had to stop due to constraints we
have on the supply-side, and the large amount of Wikipedia use."

Now, barring me paying for my own searches, is there any way that the
Wikimedia Foundation might step in for funding, either at cost
(probably insanely cheap) or with a blanket plan to whitelist
Wikipedia again?  I personally feel this would be an incredibly
valuable tool.

In addition to the benefit I think we would gain they would have the
great distinction of being a product used by one of the top 10
websites on the Internet (which could be a bargaining chip).

Thanks for any comments!
[[User:mboverload]] @ Wikipedia-EN