[Foundation-l] Baidupedia copyvio collections

Sun Jun 15 17:36:54 UTC 2008

Henning Schlottmann wrote:
> George Herbert wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>   
We're not asking them to acknowledge that it's from a banned site, only 
that it's from Wikipedia.  Wikipedia may in fact be banned but where is 
there any acknowledgement from the PRC government that it is?  Without 
an explicit statement from them it's hard to view the banning as 
anything other than a random act of bureaucracy.

Being so certain that they won't adopt free licences or that they want 
absolute ownership prejudicially cuts out a lot of possible negotiating 
positions.  That hurts us more than it hurts them. 
> 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.
>   

That sounds a lot like the political decision of a certain powerful 
government that refuses to speak with its enemies.  By taking such a 
hard line it manages to make things worse.  Saying that we would be 
giving them access to as much of our content as possible is questionable 
when they can edit the material in a way that will best impose their 
point of view.  If Baidu is so distorting the information a high profile 
is warranted to let the Chinese people know that they are not getting 
the whole story.  The law (whose?) and the licences are only a means to 
the end of making knowledge available.
> 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.
>   

Your Trojan horse is full of dead soldiers. 
> 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.
>   

Your analogy would only be valid if the GDR government had been in 
charge of making the copies of the magazine articles.

Ec