Re: Help, a plateful of plagiarism

[Dr Ronald Orenstein <ron.orenstein@rogers.com>]

Wikipedia addresses this point on its copyright page - if the web site material 
was copyright to start with it cannot, indeed, be rendered public domain by 
being used in a Wiki site - assuming that the copyright owner is not the person 
who put it there, I suppose. 

Ronald Orenstein 
1825 Shady Creek Court
Mississauga, ON
Canada L5L 3W2

On 2010-12-01, at 4:07 PM, Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com> wrote:

> No, wait, let's leave Wikipedia out of this for a moment.  The
> situation is that Trevor wrote material on his own web-site, not
> intending it to be reproduced elsewhere, and now it's turning up in a
> printed, commercial book.  Whether the vector by which Trevor's
> material reached that book includes Wikipedia or not, that's wrong.
> If the book was not wrong in taking material from Wikipedia, then
> Wikipedia must be wrong in having taken the material from Trevor's
> web-site.  You can't just put something in the public domain by
> pasting it into a Wikipedia article.
> 
> 
> 
> On 1 December 2010 19:01, Scott Hartman <skeletaldrawing@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
>> 
>>