I used to work for cha cha... Or at least, I trained their staff at my old
job. They're a text message question answering service based in the us but
using Philippine staff.
On Feb 8, 2013 1:48 PM, Daniel R. Tobias d...@tobias.name wrote:
I just ran into this Twitter account:
https://twitter.com/Wikipedia411
It has Wikipedia as part of its username/URL, and uses
Wikipedia.org as its account name (displayed at the top of its
tweets). However, the description on its account page says Facts
brought to you daily. Not affiliated with Wikipedia, aggregate
content generator.
Where copyright is concerned, it would probably be in violation of
the license of Wikipedia if it used more than fair-use amounts of
Wikipedia text, since there's reference to credits or license, but if
they just paraphrase facts derived from Wikipedia (as they seem to be
doing, and just about the only way to get anything from Wikipedia
into 140 characters anyway) they're probably in the clear there since
facts are not copyrightable (only the expression of them).
However, it is trademark law they are most clearly afoul of; despite
their disclaimer, they're using an account name that seems to imply
that they represent Wikipedia (you have to pull up their profile page
to find out they're not official, so lots of people who see retweeted
tweets from them will think they're coming from Wikipedia), and they
also use Wikipedia's logo as their icon.
While most of their tweets have facts that presumably came from
Wikipedia, the stream is peppered with tweets with teaser text and
a link, which when followed doesn't go to Wikipedia but to some site
called ChaCha (the link destination, as usual on Twitter, is
obfuscated by the use of link-shorteners). That site has the typical
annoying style of many modern websites of presenting its content in
slideshow style with bite-size chunks of content that are 1 of 10
and you have to keep following Next links to get to the rest of the
feature, and if you don't use AdBlock Plus they're all surrounded by
annoying ads, some of which blast sound at you, and try to spawn
popups and the like.
--
== Dan ==
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