[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

Fri Jun 13 00:15:12 UTC 2008

Dan Rosenthal wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 1:35 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> Dan Rosenthal wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>> I may be grossly misreading what you just wrote above, or just not
>> being well enough informed about all the statements about our
>> licencing system on-wiki, but just to clarify; what precise
>> "assurances" are you talking about?
>>
>> Yours,
>>
>> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
>>
>>
>> The assurances that I am talking about are the statements that "by clicking
> submit you are agreeing to license your submission under the GFDL". The GFDL
> requires attribution. By requiring that our contributors use the GFDL (or
> CC-BY-SA, or any other attribution required license), we are giving an
> assurance to our contributors that their work will remain attributed to
> them, and if it is not attributed to them they shall have some sort of
> remedies available to them.
> 
> By tacitly accepting Baidupedia's actions, we're undermining that assurance,
> by saying "Look, here's a wide swath of our work that is NOT attributed, and
> there's nothing that guarantees your work won't be included in it, and we're
> not going to do anything about it".
> 
> That's a huge turn-off to potential contributors.
> 

Thank you for clarifying that. I don't agree with the gloss you
put on it 100 %, but that is okay.

I do agree though that we need to support efforts to have
recourse against infringers.

Yours

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen