Plagiarizing Wikipedia For Profit 223
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How are they going to claim... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Slashdot tags (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Slashdot tags (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:According to law... (Score:3, Insightful)
There are those who honestly believe it's okay to just physically take whatever you want. Does that mean it's okay?
There are those who honestly believe it's okay to just copy whatever files they want. Does that mean it's okay?
'Morals' are not an adequate replacement for laws. The morals of the majority are a good basis for the laws, though.
Re:Slashdot tags (Score:1, Insightful)
Anyway, the slashdot commies are of course complete hypocrites. When it comes to copyright, the old adage "what's yours is mine but what's mine is my own" comes to mind.
Remember: lefties don't create, they redistribute.
Re:Slashdot tags (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:summary: The copied text is subject to GNU FDL. (Score:4, Insightful)
they are known scumbags (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How are they going to claim... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wikiplagarism (Score:4, Insightful)
So someone copied Wikipedia?
Meh.
Re:Slashdot tags (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How are they going to claim... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot tags (Score:3, Insightful)
That's as disingenuous as when record companies claim that you "steal" potential profits. This is not theft. Nothing is being taken away from the original author's possession. There is a perfectly accurate word for what has happened here, it is "plagiarism". Why play word games instead of using the proper word for things?
Re:Slashdot tags (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright infringement != theft. But this is about plagiarism, and that is theft.
There's a world of difference between copying some Beatles song versus you claiming to be the author of a "new" song that is actually a Beatles song. (Yet other issues are raised by unintentional plagiarism such as Harrison's "My Sweet Lord".) The difference is even more pronounced for out-of-copyright material such as a Beethoven work. Copy that all you like, but don't try to claim you wrote it, and sue everyone to collect royalties. Publishers are free to use Wikipedia articles, as long as they include the GFDL and don't try to take credit for that work. Or they may use anything from the public domain, and need not give any credit or notice. Usually though, they'll have some boilerplate "all contents copyright Wiley", and I'd think that if there was other material included, they shouldn't leave it at that. Although no notice is required for work in the public domain, one shouldn't imply that such work is one's own. Yet another tricky gray area is claiming copyright on expressions or modifications of a work in the public domain. So an orchestra can perform a work by Beethoven and copyright that. I suppose someone could make and copyright an audio version of any book in the public domain. Where it gets unclear is suppose the original had different spellings and usages (Shakespeare) or questionable translations (King James Bible), can a corrected or updated version that is otherwise a verbatim copy be copyrighted? But whether or no such can be copyrighted, it surely can't be claimed as one's own. For a translation of Shakespeare, it'd have to be "Joe's translation of Shakespeare's plays, translation copyright Joe" if anything, and not "Joe's translation of some plays, all content copyright Joe".
Re:How are they going to claim... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot tags (Score:5, Insightful)
In both the academic and artistic circles this is much more damaging than copyright infringement. Once you have created a work of academic or artistic value and its recognized by others as one of those things, it really becomes your personal credibility in the field. If your an artist, it gets you hired to perform, or patronized, if your an academic it gets you a job in industry, a teaching position, funding to more similar work, etc.
If someone plagiarizes your work then they may get these things instead of you and worse yet possible get you accused or suspected of plagiarism. I think its clear the original author is hurt much more by plagiarism then mere copyright infringement, which if people are bothering to infringe on your copyrights probably does more for your general credibility then anything else could and may actually benefit you in a variety, although certainly not all circumstances. If anyone wants to compare this to the RIAA crying about mp3z its would have to be like you uploading the latest top 40 song and then claiming you and your buddies performed it in the garage the other day.
Re:Wikipedia: victim and perpetrator (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Two differences... (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
Re:How are they going to claim... (Score:3, Insightful)
Plagiarize, [aol.com]
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 even worse than normal infringement (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Slashdot tags (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Especially when Bob corporate earlier sued a member of Joe Public for the same actions. "May he who is with out sin cast the first stone."