[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

Sun Jun 15 16:49:58 UTC 2008

2008/6/15 Henning Schlottmann <h.schlottmann at gmx.net>:

> 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.
>

I didn't say we Chinese Wikipedians ever tried to "Deny China any access to
Wikipedia articles".
I need to clarify this.
I am here reporting what we are doing, but please don't put your words in my
mouth.

Thanks.

Titan

> > 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.
>
>
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