[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

Fri Jun 13 21:32:14 UTC 2008

George Herbert wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 1:05 PM, Dan Rosenthal wrote:
>   
>> I'd certainly ask for advice from counsel on this, but I would want to
>> know: "given that Baidupedia is starting with GFDL content, does the
>> fact that they obscure that their content is licensed under the GFDL
>> prevent all subsequent derivative edits from also being unknowingly
>> licensed under the GFDL?"
>>
>> Essentially, if you are making a derivative work of a viral/share-
>> alike/GFDL style content, but you do not know what the status of the
>> original was (and did not agree to license your content under the
>> GFDL), what is the copyright status of the newly created derivative
>> work?
>>
>> We'd need to know the answer to that question before doing a "reverse
>> Baidupedia". If the answer is "It's under the GFDL" then we're ok to
>> proceed (ignoring for a second the moral issues). If the answer is
>> something other than that, we may not be able to do it.
>>     
> In contract terms, this seems like a classic failure of meeting of the
> minds - if the secondary contributor is unaware of the original
> license on the material, then they cannot have agreed to the license,
> and likely cannot be held to it.
>   
Perhaps one of our Chinese speakers can explain just what Baidu claims 
for copyright.  If they purport to retain it for themselves, and deny 
any rights to their own contributors it may be that the rights of those 
contributors are not legally relevant. It strikes me as unlikely that 
they would have any scheme in place that recognizes any rights for their 
contributors.

Dan makes a good point about legal counsel.  A responsible Board member 
needs to give closer scrutiny to legal implications before moving from 
proposal to implementation.  Even then, legal advice is not completely 
binding.  Reading and literally applying statutes in isolation from 
their context can produce bizarre results. Case law and the probability 
of adverse effects also play a role, as does the collective tolerance of 
the Board for what could happen.

In a mailing-list discussion we need to explore all possibilities.  A 
premature determination that something is illegal or won't work closes 
the opportunity to follow that less travelled road that everyone has 
been overlooking.  NPOV discussions are often best resolved by looking 
for that alternative wording that will make both sides happy.

While the moral arguments need to be considered we should not extend 
them to the point of self-righteousness.  For now we don't have a strong 
enough factual framework to derive a meaningful moral conclusion.

Ec