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

[Samuel Rose]

Interesting.

I agree it's fundamentally unethical. Although, if someone is really
in need (needs money for medical costs, needs money for food, water,
shelter or physical safety) I would rather they sell a copylefted work
of mine without me getting a cut.

I'll bet that was *not* the case with Books, LLC


Also, wanted to let Kasper know that Wikimedia does sell their content
(with automatic attribution given to all authors) via
http://pediapress.com/ as far as I know PediaPress does *not* pay
authors.

The publishing system that I wanted to set up with Michel using
mediawiki for P2PF/Forward Foundation *would* pay all authors through
some kind of micropayment system (one purchase would pay out to all
contributors based on different rules).

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 6:38 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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 ;)
>
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Sam Rose
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