Forum Moderators: not2easy
Short of hiring a bank of lawyers, which would require remortgaging my house and those of all my family, is there anything practical I can do?
Of course I have lost money, since Wikipedia stole my articles, they took my traffic with them and there went my advertising revenue, also.
Estimated losses to date are in the region of £10,000 since October 2006.
Matt
The people that edit articles for Wikipedia might.
Wikipedia usually catches anything it thinks is copyright material.
[en.wikipedia.org...]
BTW, you learn something every day when you read Wikipedia... Apparently, what we've been calling a "DMCA Request" isn't. It's an OCILLA request. (Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act). It's a part of the DMCA.
A more general Wikipedia page on "copyright problems":
[en.wikipedia.org...]
What irks me is they have cited several sources and list several internet sites as links - none of them me!
keyplyr said: I found 3 articles of mine published at Wikipedia, of course without permission.... What irks me is they have cited several sources and list several internet sites as links - none of them me!
Either way, it's insulting.
Eliz.
Whomever uploaded the articles needs to be banned as an editor for utter lack of discretion, lawlessness, etc. IF Wikipedia refuses to remove those who consistently (matter of proving this) flaunt the rights of others Wikipedia may eventually be deemed to either a) collude; b) be accepting the derived benefits of unlawful behavior; c) you name it.
DMCA helps, a lot, but isn't necessarily the solution to having someone authorized to act (an official act of Wikipedia) WHO exhibits a consistent pattern of misappropriation.
Methinks, at some point, a legal case will establish that just removing the offending material will not grant immunity IF there are "other, related issues" - such as consistent (repeated) patterns of troublesome behavior, particularly is that behavior can be traced to an individual AND nothing is done to remove "the troublemaker".
Also, curious to know: A) Will the appearance of your original material in Wikipedia begin to effect "who ranks for that material"? If so, is it possible that a competitor might be acting to screw you? B) IF your material appears in Wikipedia will that result in its accelerated scraping, leading to new copyright enforcement issues? (Might be a separate cause of action here.) C) Will Wikipedia help you to identify the person who initiated the copyright violation so you can pursue that person directly, for the copyright infringement? Wikipedia (likely) has a duty - enforceable by subpoena or joinder "as a party defendant for the purpose of discovery" - to turn over all identifying information to help you enforce your copyright claim.
IF you haven't done so already - and may legally still do so - you might wish to formally file for copyright protection by recording your works at the proper offer. This will aid in the prosecution of any future claims that might arise.
Interesting final question: In the future will a case arise where an entity may not be accountable for damages for copyright violation due to protections of DMCA like laws BUT may be accoutable for paying the costs associated with cleaning up any mess associated with the publication - such as the legal fees for all the pull down notices that may be required to remove all the illegal copies generated as a result of the article first appearing "in the highly scraped and duplicated source", as for example Wikipedia? They may not be responsible for direct damages (copyright infringement) but they may be responsible for "consequential damages" in the right circumstance.
It's not my or any other webmasters job to pull an article down and then rinse and repeat that with every article you've ever published, until you found all the articles and removed them, while they have all magically reappeared in your footsteps everywhere else on wikipedia and you can just rinse and repeat the process again, and again, and again.
Perhaps i'm wrong, but didn't google have to develop software to actually detect the copyright infringements on youtube before they happened? (think it'll be implemented around 1. january, according to the articles i've read in the news)
Oh, the internet, in it's less than innocent childhood, come, out from thy mothers womb. Okay, i'd better stop before I go all poetic and soft,
Sincerely and have fun,
The articles I found at Wikipedia have now been recopied to their clones, i.e. Answer dot com, and all the blogs, forums, et al who pull down their content. I must now spend the work hours searching for all the spin-off violations.
Why hasn't Wiki been held accountable for all the damage they cause.When I deleted my articles, I left a polite, but stern note theat they are not entitled to use my property without consent, but I have never received an explanation much less an apology.
Sincerely and have fun,,
The Webmaster Rights and Protection Foundation.
Making you liable for damages caused by your users since 2007.
Wikipedia has reproduced a large number of articles from my own (older) encyclopaedia without permission.Short of hiring a bank of lawyers, which would require remortgaging my house and those of all my family, is there anything practical I can do?
Of course I have lost money, since Wikipedia stole my articles, they took my traffic with them and there went my advertising revenue, also.
Estimated losses to date are in the region of £10,000 since October 2006.
Matt
I guess they call this sharing not stealing
This is a good argument for content monitoring, i.e., picking a batch of unique strings from your best content and searching for them periodically. The earlier you can catch stuff like this, the better.
I am no doubt sympathetic to your loss of income, but that is in the past. Just start editing away.
I have not the answer to this dilemma, but I suggest we all at least take this seriously and THINK about it. It sure is easy to tell someone, "oh well, you're screwed," until we are ALL screwed! OK, I am on a rant here, but this problem has been bugging me for quite some time. I have a bad feeling about all of this. I think people will just give up trying to do extraordinary things when some idiot can just take it from him without a word said. Is the internet going to dumb down society to the point where we are all drooling drones and without any empathy at all? Why care if it doesn't matter what you do? If Google takes Matt's work and dumps it for their buddy's pages at Wikipedia then why will others try to do better? Look, the fact is this problem is only going to exacerbate in the years ahead to a breaking point. What do you think should happen? Will the Government step in and patrol the net with cyber-cops? Can the internet self-regulate, somehow? What IS the answer?
[edited by: WiseWebDude at 4:31 pm (utc) on Sep. 26, 2007]
Sabotage a competitor - post their content on a fresh wikipedia page, and get them dupe-bumped.
Free Links - post your own content as an anonymous user, and then remove them with a link (ala keyplyr's recommendation) to your own site.
These of course, are symptoms, and the problem is the massive authority given to a UGC (user generated content) site.
I'm not advocating these as they are probably illegal, and just not nice. However, all of us who have quality origional content should be on the lookout.
the problem is the massive authority given to a UGC (user generated content) site
This is one of my big bug bears. As a human, I make mistakes. But, with regard to my encyclopaedia I am contactable, and accountable. People spot the odd typo (very embarrassing) and some even spot errors, which I then spend time and money rechecking with reputable sources - for example 'Jane's Yearbooks'.
The same is simply not true of so called UGC sites. They can publish all sorts of nonsense, and yet people take it as gospel. Okay, when some years ago I claimed that Iraq didn't have WMDs, in contradiction of the US and UK government's takes many people thought I was publishing nonsense, and I couldn't offer reputable sources to back up my claims, but I think I have been vindicated by the years.
Matt
It's interesting what someone added to your talk page:
All of your edits are to merely add links to a commercial, and not very well-written or informative, website. Please stop. This is considered [[WP:Spam]] and [[WP:Vandalism]]. If you have reliable information that can be cited, please add it to the articles instead. Thanks. - [[User:Special-T¦Special-T]] 14:00, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
keyplyr, why not just add your link as a reference? Since Wikipedia has your content, they can't come back and say you are spamming. Plus you'll get traffic from people looking for more information - m1t0s1s
Then a week later all those links were removed and that insulting message was put up. Unbelievable isn't it? If my articles are merely "commercial, and not very well-written or informative" then why are they being plagiarized again and again by these very same people?
Now, I'm just deleting them. I'm through playing that game. Someone outa sue them big time!
So for example they might copy a long article from another site in terms of the facts it mentions, the order it mentions them, the general structure etc, but because they've rephrased every sentence they don't regard it as a copyright violation.
I've seen this happen particularly often with biographies of famous people, they'll find a biography elsewhere and then "process" it so they can use it on Wikipedia. It's still obviously a copy of the other source with no cross-referencing to verify any of it, but none of the phrases are exactly the same.
I have no idea what the legal situation is with this kind of activity, but it seems pretty immoral. It's like children at school copying each other's homework, only one of them has actually done the work.
Or maybe the powers that be will have a virtual cyber cop bot that goes around ticketing copyright violators. And while their at it the Google faction of the powers that be can change the way they handle dup content. Maybe register the content and then next to the content put a cetified pixel from the Google Ministry of Information. And of coarse we should get rid of all UGC sites because you just cant trust users.
Well whats our choice because we cant have both. Oh well just go on and make your diminishing returns off adsense until the decision is made.
Free Links - post your own content as an anonymous user, and then remove them with a link [...] to your own site.
Wikipedia is using rel="nofollow" on external <a href> tags, hence no use for PR to create those links, at best it's useful if it's a high traffic subject.
As for the wikipedians to be responsible and not at all wikipedia itself: I'm not that sure you can escape liability if you are found to facilitate anonymous passers-by to commit copyright infringement. Since they moderate content, they are for sure not a "mere conduit" like ISPs, hence they should have some level of liability for the use of their services.
One thing that happens disturbingly often on Wikipedia is that contributors regard it as totally okay to steal material as long as it's rephrased.
Copyright law protects the words, the images, the expression, the "art", not the ideas, not the information itself, not the research. The information, the facts, etc are free to be copied.
E.g. painting of an apple is copyrighted, but you can still make your own painting of an apple, no problem. You however cannot copy the other painting on a photocopy machine and start selling those copies.
Generally it's considered good practice to mention sources, but the law is silent on such things as far as I know.
Patents protect ideas, but e.g. software patents are next to nonexistent outside the US.
and to keyplyr, the only thing I would say is either join your enemy at their own game, either by fixing little errors here and there in wikipedia, or turn your site's content into a wiki resource.
I guess wikipedia likes to "improvise" content, heehee.
That's the problem though, what is the expression? Is it the exact phrasing or is it the overall structure? Facts are facts, but there's an art to presenting facts. It requires talent and imagination to present facts in an intelligent way that analyses them instead of just stating them.
If I submit a novel to a publisher, they send it back with a rejection slip, then they issue a novel with an absolutely identical plot but none of the same phrases... I can still take them to court for stealing the overall plot.
I realise it's different with non-fiction, but it seems very unfair that you can spend months researching an article or book, then see someone else carbon copy it with slightly rephrased language and claim it as their own. It's punishing the intelligent analyst and rewarding the know-nothing plagiarist.
It's the new 'Social Web Era'. Links are for clicks.
All that 'PR' crap is SOOOoo web 2.0.
;)
