Wikipedia is under the Creative Common The license allows wikiHow content to be used freely by any organization or person for any non-commercial purpose Yet companies like www.Answers.com, www.TheFreeDictionary.com, and many more use their content for Commerical use and profit off it. I've been up for a few hours so I might be overlooking something simple.
It's probably worth noting that most of the content on wikipedia probably came from sites like that in the first place anyway. The majority of what is on there is just compiled from various sources such as those.
Actually Wikipedia doesn't prohibit commercial use of their content, in lines with the GNU Free Documentation License. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License
Once I got in touch directly with Wikipedia's team to denounce a site called freenation, republic or something like that, which runs an AdSense farm with no other content than the wikipedia replica, but they said that it was okay because their license authorize to run your own advertising along with their content
If Wikipedia went around sueing people, it would defeat the purpose of being a provider of free information, as that's the whole premise of wikipedia -- free information for the masses. Plus, all they require is that you source them and link back to the original source material.
Plus, once you start sueing, you're basically saying, "We've gone corporate and sold out!" Or at least that's the "vibe" one gives out, especially with these internet set. I'm sure that's the one thing Wikipedia never wants to be.
They'll likely lose all their editors as well. Some pretty darn good editors around...just look at the quality of the articles.
No.. I don't get it.. I don't even know who them is... but suing people to protect your property is not selling out. People need to realize that just becase an entity is labelled as non-profit, does not mean they are allergic to money. Non-profit simply means they don't take a profit from the business and all the money is reinvested. That does not mean the people working for the company or business, for example, make minimum wage. Often times you can find people in non-profits making extreme salaries because all the money has to be re-invested in the company. If you have something to support this notion that the people at Wikipedia don't want to sue people because they view it as selling out.. otherwise I don't understand your position.
Dude, I'm going to try this one more time, then I ain't gonna keep trying: Wikipedia was founded on the hippie principle of "power to the people"; they're not going to start suing people becuase THEY, the founders, would consider that SELLING OUT. Now, if you still can't get your head around this basic principle, I can't help ya.
Lol, no one is using their content illegally. 1) Wikipedia encourages people to take their content. They make it very easy by providing downloads of all their data and tools to get started to help you in the "stealing" lol 2) Wikipedia really does not want to make a big deal of copyright given that it infringes other people's copyrights all the time.
Wikipedia is a free resource, and whilst I don't agree with taking content from the site and using it as-is (I prefer to at least break it down and extract what I need), I don't think anybody is doing anything underhand. After all, the majority at least have the decency to reference the content. It would be hard for them to sue people because it is also possible that what was submitted to Wikipedia came from another site in the first place - after all, isn't the idea that anybody can submit material to Wikipedia or have I got that badly wrong? I'm glad its a freely available source and have used it on many occasions. The only thing to watch out for is garbage content - sometimes the author of a piece has just got his/her facts wrong. This isn't a problem so much on popular topics as mistakes are quickly seen and rectified (though may still be evident?...) but some of the more niche topics need research to confirm the facts. I think that it boils down to "do what you want with it", which is an unusual stance in such a commercialised world, but all the time I can go there and get what I need for free I'm a happy bunny.
Don't mistake free resource as in being able to access it for free with being allowed to freely reuse information a resource provides. People can republish Wikipedia's materials as long as they abide by the terms Wikipedia lays out for said reuse. My site is also a free resource that people can access without paying for, however per copyright laws, people are not free to republish my materials in any manner without my express written permission (which I do not give out). One thing a lot of people need to learn to understand is that just because they can access information for free on the Internet, doesn't mean they are free to do what ever they want with that information. Copyright laws still apply on the Internet.