[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

Sun Jun 15 14:25:05 UTC 2008

George Herbert wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Henning Schlottmann
> <h.schlottmann at gmx.net> wrote:

>> 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.
> 
> You're setting up a false dichotomy here.  The options are not "Allow
> Baidu to do whatever they want" and "Deny China any access to
> Wikipedia articles", with nothing in between.

According to Titan Deng, that's what the zh-Wikipedians demanded.

> Baidu could entirely credibly copy or mirror over Wikipedia articles,
> with GFDL and author history, just as easily as their users cut and
> paste now.  If the political situation is such that they can't grab
> "the whole set" of wikipedia articles, that's unfortunate, but doesn't
> prevent them from taking a subset *under the licenses and with
> credit*.

They can't: They can't acknowledge that content came from a banned 
source and they certainly won't adopt a policy of free licenses, not 
even for a small part of their content. They want to own and control all 
their content.

And I do not advocate to even discuss that with Baidu - because if they 
get under pressure, they will at best abandon the content. My position 
is to keep that issue a low profile - essentially: ignore it - in order 
to give the people in mainland China access to as much of our content as 
possible, even for the price of breaking the law and the licenses. This 
is a political decision.

The management at Baidu is not important for our issue at hand. The 
three relevant groups are the authors in the zh-WP, individuals who copy 
WP-content to Baidupedia and the general public in the PRC. Let 
individuals take as much as they want and can safely use. Let them copy 
it into Baidupedia. Let them do whatever necessary to get our content 
inside the country. Let them use Baidupedia as Trojan horse. Screw the 
license stuff. Getting information to the people - that's the mission of 
Wikipedia. The license is just a means to that end, and could and should 
be ignored where counter indicated by reality.

Ciao Henning

PS: I'm from Germany. Almost twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall and the 
Iron Curtain fell. The dissident groups in East-Germany needed nothing 
as much as information. Some Westerners smuggled political magazines 
into the country. The western public TV-stations build antennas to reach 
as much of eastern Germany as possible and had special shows that were 
targeted at Eastern Germany. The smuggled magazines were given from hand 
to hand and copied (by hand, no photocopy machines were available in 
eastern Germany), the West-German TV-stations bought international 
licenses only for their "own" audience in Western
Germany and broadcasted the content to East-Germany as well.

Illegal? Sure - but it helped at least a tiny bit.