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Plagiarizing Wikipedia For Profit

Posted by kdawson on from the ip-is-on-the-other-foot dept.

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.

2 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How are they going to claim... by malkavian · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because GDFL allows copying only if you allow the work to be freely copyable, and release the work it is included in under the GDFL.
    If this is the case, then the whole book that this text is in becomes freely copyable, as long as it's source is attributed. If the publisher chooses not to conform to this license, then it becomes in breach of copyright (as the works on Wikipedia are covered by copyright law, they're simply globally available on a license backed up by copyright law).

  2. Wikipedia: victim and perpetrator by harmonica · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are (or were) at least two articles in Wikipedia that are my texts (from my site) with slight variations on sentences. So whoever visits those Wikipedia articles (or did so in the past) and then my pages must come to the conclusion that I stole the stuff from Wikipedia without giving credit. I can't even prove that because I don't have a public version history, and archive.org is spotty when it comes to my site.

    In this case (Wiley book) the articles were there way before the book, so the case seems to be clear, but in general, I recommend to keep an open mind about who copied where.