Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

3 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot tags by EvanED · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Slashdot tags by Sirch · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I thought it was standard /. wisdom that copyright infringement isn't theft? Only when it's Joe Public doing the infringement. When Bob Corporate infringes, Slashdot's bile rises...

      While that's a gross generalization of what I perceive to be a double-standard, I can see some kind of justification behind it - Joe Public generally doesn't make money off it, whereas Bob Corporate infringes for profit.
      --
      We Build Beautiful Websites
    2. Re:Slashdot tags by pipatron · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The thing is that they did copy the text and said "this is mine, I created this", thus you stole the attribution. This does not happen when you send an mp3 to a friend.

      --
      c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */