I got this email whilst on the phone to Charlotte. :-) I had a broadly similar conversation with her, also covering 'fact laundering' a bit, and generally giving her a bit more background on print-on-demand books. Hopefully she'll talk to Amazon to get their point of view on this - as I think this is mostly Amazon's problem to solve.
Has anyone been in touch with Amazon on this issue? Thanks, Mike Peel On 28 Jan 2011, at 12:40, David Gerard wrote: > [To WMUK-l for local interest, and foundation-l as the issue's been > discussed there at length.] > > > Just spoke to a researcher, Charlotte something, for BBC 5 Live > Investigates, Sunday 9pm, this item likely to go out 9:45pm or so. > This was just for her research, it wasn't a recorded piece. > > The piece is on Books LLC and similar operations, which sell reprints > of Wikipedia articles as books on Amazon. She was after the Wikipedian > viewpoint. > > I said that it's entirely legal - that you can use our stuff without > permission, even commercially, and we like that - "Please, use our > stuff!" - you just have to give credit and let other people reuse your > version: "share and share alike." > > So the only issue is that it isn't clear enough these books are just > Wikipedia reprints. For us, the annoyance - I said that "annoyance" is > probably the word - is when a Wikipedian finds one of these books, > goes "aha, a source!", buys it and ... discovers it's just reprints of > stuff they have. "While trademark is an issue, we'd like them or > Amazon to make it a *bit* clearer that these texts are Wikipedia > reprints." > > She wasn't clear on the business model. I said these are > print-on-demand books, where *no* copies exist until someone orders > one, at which point a single copy is printed and sent. POD is *very > good* these days - you can send a PDF to a machine, and the machine > will produce an *absolutely beautiful* perfect-bound book for you, > which previously would have been quite pricey. This is enough for them > to have a tiny, tiny niche. > > I also pointed out that anyone can make their own PDFs of Wikipedia > articles and some of the projects have partnerships with outside > companies to do nice printed books of Wikipedia reprints. But in such > cases, everyone is very clear on what they're getting: a nice printed > physical copy of content they already have for free on the web. > > I tried to answer very descriptively, as I can't speak *for* 160,000 > people, but there's been enough foundation-l and related discussion to > get an idea of what people think. My apologies if I missed bits, this > was off the top of my head without referring to nuances of discussion > :-) > > > - d. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia UK mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l > WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
