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Plagiarizing Wikipedia For Profit
An anonymous reader sends word of a dustup involving the publisher John Wiley and Sons and Wikipedia. Two pages from a Wiley book, Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors, consist of a verbatim copy from the English Wikipedia article on the Khobar Towers bombing. This is the publisher that touched off a fair use brouhaha earlier this year when they threatened to sue a blogger who had reproduced a chart and a table (fully attributed) from one of their journals.
This is an interesting aspect of free license law that hasn't really been delved into yet.
You're so right! Noone on the wider internet or even slashdot has ever considered this!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
As the incredibly-talented sci-fi writer Bob Unherdof said to his struggling burger-flipper friend George Lucas in 1975....
"Hi! It looks like you're trying to steal someone else's intellectual property! Would you like me to a. attribute it properly for you or b. adjust it so your theft isn't so blatantly obvious?"
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
John Wiley and Sons could just edit the wikipedia article to be different. Problem solved.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
...was unfortunately deleted by an overzealous editor who argued that the issue did not meet notability criteria.
These stories are free but worth money.