[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

Thu Jun 12 19:35:17 UTC 2008

Dan Rosenthal wrote:
> This may be a cultural difference between you and I then. In the U.S.,
> intellectual property is property. 

This issue is not about the law - it is about politics. The law is 
perfectly clear. But the true question is:

Do we want at least some of our content to be distributed to mainland 
China so much, that we accept it is done by breaking the law?

And of course no one can stop an individual contributor to zh-WP from 
suing Baidu in any legal system and country, where Baidu has assets, for 
infringing his or her copyright. But posters in this thread repeated 
demanded that the Foundation get active to support the claims of 
individual authors.

For one, this is not possible under the current license (and any planned 
revision I have heard of). And: I don't think it would be wise, because 
I prefer getting at least some of our content inside the country over 
not getting it in and supporting starving IP lawyers.

The Great Firewall is a fact. And insisting on license issues and 
attribution would unfortunately be playing the game of the powers that 
are in the Peoples Republic. Because that would prohibit the people 
there from accessing even the noncontroversial content, that was 
available to them, because someone considered the distribution of 
knowledge more important then IP law. I think it is a safe bet, that 
Baidu will not attribute the content to Wikipedia authors and will not 
put parts of their system under the GFDL.

And beyond the issue at hand: There are so many infringing mirrors out 
there, that a service in China that hosts a bunch of non related 
articles copied by individuals is insignificant.

Ciao Henning