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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't work that way; copyleft/ShareAlike is not a automatic trap that can be applied to your work against your will. It's a condition for permitted reuse.

If you violate the condition, then you have no permission to use. Then, since you've used without permission, the copyright holder can sue you for damages, and/or to stop/mitigate the violation.

The copyright holder might propose that relicensing your work under copyleft/ShareAlike would be sufficient penance for them to settle. But it's not automatic -- "you used X, thus your work in now licensed as X demanded".

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So if he had said, "I got this from this wikipedia article," then his book would also have been ShareAlike?

Maybe he didn't want that... I don't understand really, did he think no one would find out? What is his response? I looked on thelongtail.com but don't see anything.

No. Only if he says, "I license my work under copyleft/ShareAlike", is it under ShareAlike.

Anderson's response is quoted at the end of the article.

Roughly he says: "Whoops, we copied it by mistake, it should have been quoted or rewritten. We'll correct online and in future printings."

It doesn't in any way change his copyright/license. (He may very well offer the book for free, given his schtick, but there's no automatic compulsion to. And if you copied his work without permission, you couldn't argue "but he did the same thing" or "he accidentally gave me permission".)

But on the other hand, to legally quote Wikipedia the book would have to be ShareAlike licensed, too? I think that is quite shocking, I thought Wikipedia was more open than that.

No, there's another option: Fair use.

If you create a book compilation of "Wikipedia's greatest hits", then you're stuck releasing the book as ShareAlike or negotiating with the copyright holder(s).

If you write a book about a particular topic and you use excerpts, quotes, or ideas from Wikipedia (and properly cite them), that's fair use. I'm sure there's some sort of ceiling on that (IANAL) which prevents you from copy+paste-ing broad swaths of text into your work and "citing" it.

The key is the citation, which is where the author screwed up. If you're using text/ideas from a particular source and not citing that source, then you're not covered under fair use and are obliged to follow whatever licensing system the original author wishes.

I'm surprised (and confused) -- can you really include a great number of large, verbatim or nearly verbatim blocks of text from Wikipedia, cite them, and not be called out for plagiarism?

What's to stop any author from saving themselves hours/weeks/years of effort by simply by copying text and sticking a citation at the end of the paragraph, as it appears was done in this case?

Reuse can never be 'plagiarism' if you cite your source and present it as a quote. Plagiarism is only presenting someone else's work as if it were your own.

Now, if the book is 99% other people's work, but all copying is cited, you might still run afoul of copyright laws for copying without permission. But it won't be plagiarism. Whether 'fair use' applies depends on a test where many factors are weighed. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Very roughly, the idea is: does your use add value for society without damaging the value of the original work? Using less is better than using more. Using for educational/nonprofit uses is better than trying to make a quick buck. Trying to make a buck in a new transformative way is better than trying to make a buck at the expense of (by replacing) the original work in the marketplace. Using just enough to have a conversation about the work, adding your commentary, is better than just reusing the juicy parts to save yourself effort. Etc.

The copyright belongs to the contributors, which means that any of the people who wrote the plagiarised sections may sue, but Wikipedia cannot.

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