Slashdot Mirror
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.
Perhaps an imaginative programmer out there will develop a "De-Plagiarize" application and port it to all platforms. Paste the text or graph into the box and out pops a perfect paraphrase.
(Profit?)
Although the author of the linked page says he wrote much of the disputed text and released it into public domain, the license governing Wikipedia is GNU FDL, as can be seen by a link at the bottom of every page. The combined work, because it includes work by others, is covered by that license.
:)
If Wiley published this text without citing the FDL, they're in violation of it. Seems pretty clear. Further, the license says that if the work is modified, the resulting document must also be released in FDL, according to section 4. This is where it gets interesting.
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).
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.
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.
Copyright doesn't require proof of damages, but damages could be calculated from the sold copies of the book.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
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.
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?
I could see semi-randomised text being a problem in it's own waterbuffalo.
Blank until
As the incredibly-talented sci-fi writer Bob Unherdof said to his struggling burger-flipper friend George Lucas in 1975....
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.
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.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Bingo, got it in one.
However, the prize for most shameless copyright infringement goes to The Times Of India.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.
They're not giving ANYTHING away. They're licensing a copy of their product to you, under certain conditions.
They neither wanted nor did that, the Wikipedia text is under the GFDL which requires attribution of source. The WP author mentioned released his contribution to the public domain, but the wider Wikipedia community has the right to be outraged that this writer a) plagiarised Wikipedia and b) didn't credit the authors of the text that he plagiarised. He claimed the words as his own, which is unlawful in many copyright jurisdictions regardless of any licence that the original author may have used. If the publisher sells that book in Finland, then they could find themselves in hot water. And I don't mean a nice invigorating sauna.
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.
In addition to what Phil has pointed out in another reply, it's worth pointing out that there are many different Creative Commons licenses, and they vary in what they permit. Some of them do not permit commercial use, some of them require attribution, some of them are more permissive.
Please, if you are going to make claims about what something does and doesn't permit, at the very least you should be vaguely familiar with it yourself. Creative Commons is a brand name for a bunch of different licenses, not a license itself.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
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.
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).
If we have a stethoscope for the minds of various characters involved at different time, it could be like this:
A year later...
I once had a signature.
But. . .how can you have profit with out ??? ?
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
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.
Think bigger, think RIAA big - calculate damages based on how many copies of the book *could* have been sold. Until I found out about this dishonesty I was set to buy a dozen copies at least, as was everyone I've ever met.
*even if they remove the offending pages from future copies*, since the entire book is now contaminated.
This is untrue. First, because the license doesn't automatically become FDL, it becomes a license violation which should be dealt with through law. Second, because there is nothing that states that once something is released using FDL it always has to be released in that license. The author is free to release his portion of the work using any license he/she chooses, in the same way that software publishers can dual license their software.
If the license did automatically become FDL, then the author would still be able to publish the book under a different license without those portions. Those who received the original release that was forced FDL (if this hypothetically did happen), could redistribute the work under the FDL, but those who purchased the other version would not have received it under the FDL and thus could not redistribute it.
- except it was an application included on a CD in David Pogue's Palm PDA book:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/palmpilot/
- my client's simple license clearly stated 'no distribution on media without permission,' but it was included...
- i never busted o'reilly's chops about it, 'cause i met him one time at a Perl conference in Monterey and he was very nice to me...