User talk:Jdavidb/Copyright

The website absoluteastronomy.com is ripping off Wikipedia content without following the GNU FDL. I sent the following email to webmaster@absoluteastronomy.com (the contact address for the domain listed by WHOIS). If there aren't any results I'll look into other ways to follow up.

Copyright enforcement is a great way to bring awareness to the issue of open content. I have the right to insist that my copyrighted material be used in the way I allow or not at all, and I am willing to use that right to help the cause of open content. Jdavidb 19:55, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Dear sir or madam,

This is to provide you notice that you are in violation of terms for distributing my copyrighted material on your website. At issue is the following page on your website, as well as other articles from the same source:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/s/si/singing_school.htm

I am the primary author of this article as well as others that you have reproduced on your site. This article and others that you have reproduced are all under copyright. You do not have rights to distribute these articles except as provided by the copyright owners.

These articles were obtained from Wikipedia at http://www.wikipedia.org/. Wikipedia makes clear my terms for distribution of my work; these terms may be found in the attached document, the GNU Free Documentation License. The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL) provides that you may redistribute my articles, but only under certain conditions. Namely, you are required to make clear to anyone to whom you distribute my articles that the articles are licensed under the GNU FDL by stating so on the article page and providing a copy of the GNU FDL, and you must acknowledge the authorship of the articles. In this case you must either put my name and the names of my co-authors on the articles or you may provide a link on each article page back to the original article on Wikipedia.

If you do not comply with these terms you do not have the right to redistribute my articles and you must remove them from your site. Please comply immediately by providing the text of the GNU FDL on your website for each Wikipedia article and by acknowledging the authorship of this material. As it is you are in breach of copyright, you are misrepresenting your site as the author and owner of this material, and you are failing to let readers of your website know that they also have limited rights to make use of and redistribute the articles under the GNU FDL.

Thank you, J. David Blackstone

Feel free to help improve the letter
I will probably send this letter to additional infringers. I encourage anyone who is interested to be bold and edit it if you think you can make it better. I also of course encourage you to use the letter (modified to reflect an article that you have written) and pursue GNU FDL compliance at this or other non-compliant sites. Jdavidb 20:00, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Response
I received the following reply:

Each article has the following text at the bottom and includes links to the wikipedia article and the GFDL, as requested by wikipedia:

The source of this article is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

If for some reason this text is not visible for you, please send me a screenshot.

Javascript
It appears that the links to credit Wikipedia only appear when the user runs Javascript. I have sent the following response:

Looking at your site it appears that the notification is only visible when the browser has Javascript activated. Since some browsers do not even support Javascript and since some users will access without it, I don't think this completely fulfills your obligation. It should be simple to add the appropriate links in such a way that they are visible in the HTML of the page itself rather than Javascript.

I do appreciate that you have put the works in to add the links, but you need to make clear to each person who reads these articles that they have certain rights under the GNU FDL. That includes those who visit your site with a browser that does not run Javascript.

J. David Blackstone