Re: Help, a plateful of plagiarism

[Scott Hartman <skeletaldrawing@gmail.com>]

I'm afraid when it comes to Wikipedia it's legal IF they include the
proper GNU license somewhere.  If the book doesn't, then it's
violating Wikipedia's copy"left" agreement, but Wikipedia isn't really
in the habit of lawyering up and suing people who violate the
agreement.  As a 3rd party (the one the wiki page is based on) you
have no rights at all, except to ask Wikipedia to take down
information they are cribbing from you (assuming their use of the
content is beyond fair use rights).

At one point it was not like this, and you could provide content or
images and retain copyright as long as it was free to educational or
non-commercial projects, and at that time I was willing to supply data
and images to authors of Wikipedia pages.  Several years ago and for
reasons I still don't fully understand they made the shift to not
allowing material to retain any form of copyright at all (at which
point I declined further participation).  Wikipedia is an interesting
experiment, and I fully support the concept of open access to
information, but it's also inherently anti-expertise in how it's
managed (I'm not trying to sound sore, that was explained to me
verbatim by several of the higher ranking editors), since
professionals usually need to retain attribution or copyright for the
sake of their careers.

So unfortunately there's little recourse outside of leaving a nasty
review on Amazon.

-Scott


-- 
Scott Hartman
Scientific Advisor/Technical Illustrator
(307) 921-9750
www.skeletaldrawing.com