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Comment by Willie_Dynamite | Hacker News Reader

He seems to follow the wikipedia licence.

So does every other wikipedia clone site. But that's besides the point, he claims that mahalo is built with their users' content, clearly that is not the case.

Sure, but using Wikipedia content in manner permitted by its license is not 'stealing' it.

Fair enough, that's a misleading title. 'Lift' instead of 'Steal' or maybe 'copy' would be better.

"Redistribute under the terms of the GFDL."

Let me guess... Linux distributions are "stealing" Firefox? Oh, there isn't some holy war against that, so it's a good thing. Right.

Do Linux distributions take Firefox and laden it with advertisements?

Some do. Ubuntu replaces the default home page with an Ubuntu-specific search box that points to the highest bidder's search engine.

It is perfectly compliant with GPL/GFDL to take the product and fill it with ads. There is nothing wrong with doing that.

They'd certainly be within their rights if they did.

And it is perfectly within everyone else's rights to frown upon it.

The liberal licensing of Free software/content does not mean every use of those freedoms is a good and positive thing. And nobody is being inconsistent by treating it as a bad thing, while still recognizing it's within one's rights to do.

It said right there on the page I looked at that the information was from wikipedia.

As the title of this posting suggests, that's apparently the backup plan because they lack enough original content.

The fact that they attribute it is nice but does not detract from that point.

JC is on the record stating more than once that mahalo.com is built using user supplied content, he seems to have stretched that definition to now include the content of other sites as well.

Actually, no he doesn’t. Just linking back to the Wikipedia page is insufficient. To whit:

> You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform. [...] You must keep intact all notices that refer to this License and to the disclaimer of warranties with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform. [...] If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must [...] keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing [...]

Mahalo has a link to the CC-BY license 3.0 (even though the link is oddly titled "CC License 2.0"). It is not acceptable to take content from wikipedia (licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0) modify it, and release it under a different license with conflicting terms.

This could be cleared up by unambiguously stating on the Mahalo pages that the content was available under the CC-BY-SA license 3.0, and providing a link directly to the terms of the license.

In fact as a wikipedia user, contributor, if I remember right the change form CC2 to CC3 at wikipedia was done to handle these sort of issues with credit not being given correctly..

I wonder does the DCMA takedown rules apply here?

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