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 == Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/ Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/ Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
