User talk:WAvegetarian/Cassiopedia

First notice sent 2008-04-20 to editors@cassiopedia.org (listed here)

Dear Site Operator:

I am pleased to see that your website, Cassiopedia uses content from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/), the free encyclopedia. This is the sort of reuse that those who contribute to Wikipedia, as I do, wish to promote.

However, you must follow the GNU Free Documentation License (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:GFDL), which governs all Wikipedia content. Only the GFDL is legally binding. However, we do make certain recommendations about how to comply. First, I’d like to point out that when you use content from Wikipedia you ought to include a link back to the source Wikipedia article as is suggested on Wikipedia’s copyrights page, which is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights. Text such as "This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia" is a good way to acknowledge the general source of the text.

Specifically, your page http://www.cassiopedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Coulee uses content from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulee. I was a contributor to this article, and text that I wrote appears on your site. Since it appears without attribution to me, or a link to the Wikipedia history, the existence of this page violates my copyright, as well as those of all other contributors.

Please add the required links and acknowledgments to all parts of your Cassiopedia site that use Wikipedia content promptly. Thank you.

Sincerely, Connor Lee

First notice sent 2008-04-27 to editors@cassiopedia.org (listed here)

Dear Site Operator,

I've previously contacted you about your web site Cassiopedia (http://www.cassiopedia.org/), which uses Wikipedia content licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL). An example is http://www.cassiopedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Coulee, which is based on the Wikipedia article Coulee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulee). The text of the GFDL can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GFDL . To use that content without copyright infringement you must either comply with the requirements of the GFDL or use the more convenient approximation described on the Wikipedia Copyrights page by doing both of the following:

  1. Include a readily readable link to the article in the Wikipedia from which the content came.
  2. Include a link to a copy of the GFDL on your own server.

A notice of this form is suggested, for the article called Bar:

This article is licensed under the <a href="gfdl.html">
GNU Free Documentation License</a>. It uses material from the 
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar">Wikipedia article "Bar"</a>.

Please promptly change your site to comply with the requirements and let me know that you have done so or tell me your schedule for doing so, so that I can let the other copyright holders know that no further action is necessary. Thank you,

Connor Lee Administrator, English Language Wikipedia

First reply from admin@cassiopedia.org sent on 2008-04-27

[Paraphrased] Connor Lee wrote:

Dear Site Operator,

I've previously contacted you about your web site Cassiopedia (http://www.cassiopedia.org/), which uses Wikipedia content licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL). An example is http://www.cassiopedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Coulee,

Hello,

You will find that we deleted the page you referenced a while ago.

Also note that every article on Cassiopedia has a footer complying with the requirements of the GFDL. It has been there since Cassiopedia first went online.

The Admins admin@cassiopedia.org

Response sent on 2008-04-27

Dear Admins,

I also wrote:

Please add the required links and acknowledgments to all parts of your Cassiopedia site that use Wikipedia content promptly.

The page I referenced was just one of many that infringe on my copyright and the copyright of other Wikipedia contributors. The attribution issue I cited appears to be extant in every article on your site. Deleting the one example I gave does not fix the site-wide violation.

I did notice the footer at the bottom of your article pages, however it does not fully meet the license requirements of the GFDL based on the interpretation that you copied from the English Language Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights) and posted on your website as your own (http://www.cassiopedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=Cassiopedia:Copyrights). The content currently displayed at those two URLs states that the authorship acknowledgment requirement can be satisfied by "a direct link back to the article," in lieu of full preservation of the article's history (GFDL Section 4.i) under assumption that the original article will maintain this information. None of you pages have this. Some of your pages reference "an uncorrected copy," but none mention a source for the content. Wikipedia is not a copy of your articles; rather your articles are a derivative forked copy of Wikipedia's. Please give attribution to Wikipedia and its editors as the source and authors of the content from which your site is derived, instead of audaciously implying that you are the originator of the content.

Your inclusion of a notice, whether it provides compliance or not, on article pages provides evidence of your knowledge that attribution is necessary when copying a work licensed under the GFDL. As every page on the English Language Wikipedia website includes the footer text: "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License," and you preserved this footer when you copied these pages, I don't understand why there is no similar attribution notice on any of the pages you copied that are not part of the encyclopedic content of Wikipedia. All of your pages that utilize text from Wikipedia need to have compliance with GFDL license under which said text is available for use.

Again, I ask you to please promptly change your site to comply with the requirements and let me know that you have done so or tell me your schedule for doing so, so that I can let the other copyright holders know that no further action is necessary.

Thank you,

Connor Lee Administrator, English Language Wikipedia

Reply sent on 2008-04-29 from admin@cassiopedia.org

[Paraphrased]

Hello,

Certain aspects of Cassiopedia are being worked on right now. One thing we are working on is re-examining copyright issues, which aren't perfect as you mentioned. We started doing this a week ago. Please be patient while we finish this asap. Thank you.

The Admins admin@cassiopedia.org