[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

Thu Jun 12 17:41:35 UTC 2008

Henning Schlottmann wrote:
> Last time I checked, Wikipedia was about disseminating free knowledge. 
> Unfortunately the projects are blocked by the Chinese government, so 
> people of the peoples republic have no access to our content, not the 
> the parts that are deemed dangerous by the government, not to the other 
> parts. Now someone takes at least some of the uncontroversial content 
> and makes it available by copying into Baidu.
>
> 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.
>
> But as our mission is to distribute our knowledge, I believe this is the 
> second best way to distribute our articles, and the best available until 
> the forces that are open up the Great Firewall.
This seems like one of those end-justifies-the-means arguments. It 
compromises principles for the sake of expediency.  If we want knowledge 
to be free we also want it to remain free.  Acknowledging the licence is 
more than being "nice", it's essential to free knowledge.

Ec