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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.

9 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. How are they going to claim... by The_Mystic_For_Real · · Score: 1, Interesting

    ...losses, when they give away their work? This is an interesting aspect of free license law that hasn't really been delved into yet.

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    1. Re:How are they going to claim... by MickLinux · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I know you are asking how Wikipedia will claim losses -- but I could as easily turn it around to the publisher.

      How will the publisher claim losses, when (by the GNU FDL) they are now going to have to give away their work?

      Quite simply, the answer is that the publisher won't have to give away their work. Rather, the work of the publisher is specifically in making a text available in the form of a book, along with referencable ISBN. They *will* at this point have to include a GNU FDL with the book, *even if they remove the offending pages from future copies*, since the entire book is now contaminated.

      But honestly, the amount of photocopying and such that will happen is not going to significantly increase.
      In the end, the fair price that a publisher can charge is defined by the utility that the publisher adds. Aside from that, the price that a publisher can *get* is more defined by the current accepted fair price for other books than for this book. So if a FDL goes in the book, then the reader will just look at it, say "oh, nice." And go on.

      Now, how can Wikipedia claim damages? There are more damages possible than cash value. There are damages to the reputation of the actual authors, damages to frequency of customer visits, and these do have an inherent value to which a lawyer will assign a cash value. Yes, it will be slightly arbitrary. But, on the other hand I think that a jury will find that the value of damages is (1) relatively large, and (2) at least proportional to the increased value recieved by John Wiley Publishing and the author. Typically, when theft occurs value is destroyed (they steal my car, but bust up the key mechanism). Therefore, you might expect damages to total 1.5-3 times the expected sales of the book, scaled down by the proportion of pages that were plagiarized. So for a 120-pg book, 2 pages copied, damages could total 1/40 to 1/20 of total expected sales.

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    2. Re:How are they going to claim... by PhilHibbs · · Score: 5, Interesting

      No, licences do not automatically apply, the *PL and CC* licences are not viral. If I copy your work and disregard the licence, then I have violated your copyright, and you can take me to court. If you released it under a particular licence, then that is pretty much irrelevant to me - if I didn't follow the licence, then I have simply violated your copyright. This author may well have asked a researcher or even a member of his family to come up with a couple of paragraphs about that incident and they copied Wikipedia, it would be unreasonable for the author's entire book to become freely available under the LGPL due to his carelessness in not checking the actions of a third party. A judge might come up with a reasonable compromise, such as ruling that the modified version of the text as appears in the book must be licenced under the LGPL and made available on the publisher's web site for download, and that future printings must credit the Wikipedia article as the source on which the text is based.

    3. Re:How are they going to claim... by Tango42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You are correct. The Wikimedia (with an 'm') Foundation does not have any legal rights to the content of Wikipedia other than what the GDFL gives everyone. If anyone is to be sued over copyright violations of text in Wikipedia, it needs to be by at least one of the editors of the article in question (not including editors that have just corrected spellings, added cleanup tags, etc).

  2. Copyright isn't the be all and end all by Skippy_kangaroo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The Wikipedia link discusses the problem of bringing copyright violation charges. But, even if it is released in the public domain, the problem for the publisher and author is the charge of plagiarism.

    Many high-profile authors have been brought down by charges of plagiarism. They have not been sued for copyright violations but they have suffered significant consequences nonetheless. See, for example, the recent case of Kaavya Viswanathan. As such, I would think that the copyright violation angle can be pretty much ignored. It's distracting and weak. The plagiarism charge, however, could have significant consequences.

  3. So is it plagiarism by od05 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is it plagiarism if I make up something, post it in Wikipedia, write an academic paper, and cite the reference I previously had made up?

    1. Re:So is it plagiarism by Dunbal · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If your academic paper cites wikipedia, well, good luck with peer review...

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  4. How about thinking about a license first by Moraelin · · Score: 1, Interesting

    How about the fact that the license explicitly gives them the right to? We have all the laws there to assign any license you wish to your work, to fit whatever moral rules you wish.

    Find it distasteful for example that someone would use your work for profit? Fine! Put a "not for commercial use" clause on it then. Or put the BSD "thou shalt give credit" license on it. Or whatever you wish.

    But if you chose to place your work under, say, the Creative Commons, you've just told the world at large, "here, take it and use it as you wish, I don't want anything in return, I don't forbid anything, have fun with it." So please have the _decency_ then to not act enraged when someone does just that. You _had_ all the framework you needed to protect it in any other way, and you chose explicitly not to. People are doing exactly what you officially told them it's ok.

    Or do you think it's morally superior to make an U-turn on your word there. "See, I said you could use it, but I didn't _really_ mean it. Now let me tell you retroactively the _real_ conditions that I want you to obey. And let me call you names, while I'm at it." It's like me telling you that, sure, you can use my ballpoint pen, and then retroactively making a fuss that you used it to sign a cheque and trying to impose conditions retroactively. See, I thought it would be self-evident that it's only for non-commercial stuff and that you must worship the ground I walk on for letting you do that.

    No, the problem isn't with laws vs morals, it's with idiot utopians getting surprised that the world doesn't work like their utopian fantasy world, and that they've been preaching a stupidity all along. Again: you had your chance to impose any morals and conditions on using your work as you can possibly wish for. If you chose to essentially waive all rights and demands, it's pretty damn stupid to expect everyone to somehow just know that you don't _really_ mean that. It's not exploiting some obscure legal loophole, it's doing what that license explicitly told them that it's allowed.

    Briefly: if you explicitly chose a license that, essentially, goes contrary to your morals/beliefs/sense-of-justice, then it's not the world at large who's callous and immoral when they obey that license. It's you who's too fucking stupid to even know what you really want.

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  5. Re:Copy/Paste needs help by David+Gerard · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There is actually a bot on Wikipedia that runs Google checks on all new articles and marks any text it finds elsewhere for speedy zapping. This turns up more than a few false positives, but mostly huge amounts of copyright violations that then get quickly zapped.

    Wikipedia remains the only "Web 2.0" project that proactively gives a damn about copyright.

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