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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.
According to law, they are doing nothing illegal and are even protecting their own legal rights. This is what happens when law dictates human behaviour, instead of morals. Precisely this situation Plato envisioned when he said that good men need no laws to tell them how to behave, and evil men will find ways around the laws.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
interesting aspect of...license law that hasn't really been delved into yet
Ehhh...no?
Wiley published their content under a completely different license that the original authors had not agreed to. Getting the agreement of said original authors to publish their work is commonly done by paying them for that privilege. No money changed hands.
Or put differently...courts deal all day with putting a monetary value on things that cannot be mathematically calculated (for example: loss of life, loss of amenity, loss of potential future earnings, mesne profits, damages in torts actionable per se, e.g. trespass to the person). This is no different.
This article is tagged "thief". I thought it was standard /. wisdom that copyright infringement isn't theft?
Anyway, are we sure that the text is from Wikipedia, and not both from a third source? It's probably unlikely, but "they copied from Wikipedia" is far from the only explanation.
Not that "interesting" really. Saying that it "must be" under the GFDL isn't the same as saying that it automatically is under the GFDL. They are in violation of copyright, plain and simple, the GFDL doesn't automatically apply to the whole book, that's crazy talk. It's then up to the lawyers or the courts to come up with a suitable violation penalty and a solution going forward.
Wiley made my EE intro to circuits book. 1) there were many mistakes, on 3rd edition run. 2) you had to purchase the answer manual seperately. Ordering it got you a cheap, useless book and a registration card for their online system to actually get the answers. The site made it difficult to save the answers, and the registration expired after 1 year. Yeah, scumbags.
I would submit that Wikipedia contains more plagarism than any one textual work ever created.
So someone copied Wikipedia?
Meh.
It is interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backwards in time through a temporal warp and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws.
Actually, you can notify Wikipedia of copyright violations. They're usually pretty good about following up. As for how to know which came first, one way is with The Wayback Machine.
I had some stuff copied off of a web page and made into a wikipedia article. I reported it as soon as I became aware of it and within a few days, the page was replaced. I don't know if they're always that responsive. It probably depends on who monitors the pages in question.
First, when Joe Public infringes, he generally does so for himself. When Bob Corporate does, it's for the world at large.
Second, Bob Corporate usually gets away with it. If Joe Public is caught, he faces heavy, personal penalties. Bob Corporate can simply have Bob Corporate Inc cover the damage, assuming that they're caught at all and that they lose in court.
Finally, we take great delight in finding a similar double-standard in Bob Corporate. This company, for instance, went after someone else for a fairly sizable quote (with attribution), and we now find them stealing wholesale (with no attribution). This seems almost second nature to most corporations -- in fact, I forget where it was, but I seem to remember reading someone psychoanalyzing a corporation (as if it were a human) and finding that it's insane.
Which comes back to "A person is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it."
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ahem. It's called "Research".
/begin oblig Tom Lehrer lyric/
Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it please, "research".
This is far worse than normal infringement, because when I infringe copyright, I'm honest about it, and so are millions of others. We know what we're doing, and we don't try to cover it up. We give credit to the creator.
These entities, on the other hand (the example in the FA, the plagiarism of the Wiki by The Times of India, and many others) are worse - they do not even acknowledge the source. They do not give the creator due credit. Not only do they infringe copyright and break the law, they also try to pass off others' work as their own - something that file-sharers and other "personal use" infringers do not do. Not only that, they actually profit from it - which is precisely what copyright law was originally supposed to prevent.
In fact, given this context, the state should come down much harder on these entities than on simple "personal use" infringers, because the prevention of such abuses is the very purpose of copyright law in the first place.