Re: Help, a plateful of plagiarism

[Heinrich Mallison <heinrich.mallison@googlemail.com>]

As I said, if the WP page is a rip-off, then Trevor's case is against
WP: If it is not, but the text in the book is close enough to the WP
version that it could be derived from WP, then Tervor is screwed. If
the text is unambiguously from his site and not WP (which will, from
what he wrote) be hard to show, then his case is against the book. If
the book's text is from WP and doesn't cite WP, then WP has a case
against the book.

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 10:07 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
>>
>>
>