[p2p-research] publishing wikipedia articles for money, is that a scam?

[Michel Bauwens]

see kasper souren's article here at
http://guaka.org/2010/11/25/books-llc-scam-amazon

for me, this would be legitimate, given the license, but not necessarily
ethical, depending on how the benefit sharing happens with wikipedia and its
authors,

would kleiner's copyfarleft offer a solution to this?

kasper, feel free to also publish this on the p2p blog if you like,

Michel

Books LLC scam on Amazon
Submitted by Kasper Souren on November 25, 2010 - 17:50

I love books about linguistics and I've been learning Hebrew and Arabic for
a while now. So I was happy to see this title on Amazon: Semitic
Linguistics: Proto-Semitic Language, Semitic Root, Status Constructus,
Broken Plural, Nonconcatenative Morphology, Emphatic
Consonant<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Semitic-Linguistics-Proto-Semitic-Constructus-Nonconcatenative/dp/115770347X/ref=cm_cr_wr_img>
.
Scam LLC

I ordered it without too much thought. When the shipment arrived I was a bit
surprised at how thin the book was, which costs almost 10 quid. I took it
with me on a trip without looking into it. In the train I opened the book
and I felt had. It's fucking scam.

Apparently *Books LLC* is taking articles from Wikipedia and putting them up
for sale on Amazon. Perfectly legal, thanks to the Creative Commons
Attribution ShareAlike license. But it's still a fucking rip-off. Especially
since they can come up with tons of new "books" every day like this.
The problem lies with Amazon

The main problem here lies with Amazon. I really don't understand why they
accept selling this book. It screws up their name and it will be a while
before I order books again there without deep scrutiny of the books - which
makes it less likely I'll buy there.

Today I shipped back the book, which costs me 6 euros, but it's worth every
euro if it makes Amazon consider taking Books LLC crap off of their online
store... And apart from writing it off with this blog post I left some more
reviews for books from Books LLC on Amazon.

Meanwhile it would be good if the Wikimedia Foundation dives into this and
starts selling printed Wikipedia articles themselves. I would be happy to
buy these since it would look much better, and the money would go to support
Wikipedia. And if it turns out to be a genuine success we won't have to look
at Jimbo next year whenever we look up something on Wikipedia ;)


-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20101127/205ac3f6/attachment.html>