[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

Thu Jun 12 17:08:27 UTC 2008

This may be a cultural difference between you and I then. In the U.S.,
intellectual property is property. It can be owned, and ownership rights
asserted, and the fact that when others infringe upon it you are not missing
it, does not mean that a theft has not occured. Consider a design for a new
chemical that I am working on. If you take my notes and make the chemical
yourself, I technically have not lost anything that I already owned. Yet, it
is still theft because you are depriving me of the right to profit from my
creation, the right to license it as I choose, the right to maintain and
assert my ownership, etc. All those things are rights that I have, and it is
the theft of the rights that is the problem, not the copying of the content.

I don't know if you have access to OTRS, but one of the common complaints
that I see there, and one of the common questions I see from people
unfamiliar with Wikipedia is "Why would you do all this for free?" or "How
come other people can use my content". We satisfy those people by reassuring
them that their authorship will be adequately protected by the GFDL, by
ensuring that under the terms of the license, they will be credited as the
author, and nobody can steal their authorship and ownership of the work by
claiming it as their own.

But that's exactly what Baidupedia has done. The assurances to every single
person who has ever contributed to a WMF project are undermined as long as
Baidupedia uses our content while claiming it as their own, under copyright.
It is not copying. Copying would be merely them reusing the content. It's
their claim that THEY were the authors, that it belongs to them, that it is
something they could potentially sue you over. That is the theft; the theft
of the authorship and ownership rights of the Wikipedian who wrote the
content. It is fundamentally unacceptable that we support that.

Nobody is saying they should have to take it down. We don't want them to do
that, as long as we don't have an in-route to China. They need only come
into compliance with the terms of the license. As I said before, the needs
of every contributor everywhere else in the world come first.

You keep repeating that "it works different in mainlaind china". That
doesn't matter. Every country works differently somehow from every other
country. Our duty is not to China alone: it is to the world, a world that
overwhelmingly supports that authors should have certain rights; a world
that even China itself supports the enforcement of these rights. Baidupedia
is not China. It is a company that is hurting our contributors. We should be
looking for ways to heal them and fix the problem, not for ways to excuse
their poor behavior.

-Dan
On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Henning Schlottmann <h.schlottmann at gmx.net>
wrote:

> Dan Rosenthal wrote:
> > On 6/12/08, Henning Schlottmann <h.schlottmann at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> >> Of course it would be nice if they would acknowledge the license and
> >> give proper attribution. But they can't - Wikipedia is banned and they
> >> can't name this source.
>
> > Free knowledge does not mean that the information itself is unrestricted,
> > nor does it mean that the authors who make information free waive all of
> > their rights. We fundamentally require attribution to our authors under
> our
> > license.
>
> As if I didn't know that ... but I still don't believe it is applicable.
>
> > If Baidupedia is not respecting that, and are not in
> > compliance with the other terms of the GFDL, then it is very difficult to
> > say that they are working for the freedom of knowledge.
>
> Who cares? They distribute encyclopedic information into mainland China.
> That's what counts. Not some nifty details about licenses and attribution.
>
> > Copyright
> > infringement != free knowledge. It == theft.
>
> NACK - IP piracy is not theft, it's illegal copying. Frankly, it's a
> shame when Wikipedians repeat the false analogies of the IP industry.
>
> > By enforcing that other
> > websites respect the terms of the licenses our works are published under,
> we
> > are actually furthering free knowledge by giving our contributors some
> > assurances that their work will be protected and not abused.
>
> Yeah sure ... try that with mainland China. Would be nice if it worked,
> but it's not that realistic for the time being. There "imitation" still
> "is the sincerest form of flattery."
>
> > I know that I,
> > for one, would have second thoughts about some of my contributions if I
> knew
> > that it would be taken by another person and used under their name.
> That's
> > not free dissemination, its theft.
>
> It's not theft - if it were, something would be taken from you, so
> someone else would hold it and you would not. IP piracy is illegal
> copying, because before, during and after you still hold your work -
> just someone else has another copy of it without your consent. That's
> illegal but it is not theft.
>
> Ciao Henning
>
>
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-- 
Dan Rosenthal