22 Oct
2010
22 Oct
'10
12:08 p.m.
On 2010 Oct 21, at 1:44 PM, <arcarlini at iee.org> wrote:
Tony Duell [ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk] wrote:
If one does a search on amazon for "Betascript" (the publishers), you
get back 116,000 results on everything from navy ships to game shows to
"open theism". Everything is 'edited' by the same 3 people.
They're not exactly trying to hide what they're doing, but I'd still
call it sleazy, especially when you look at the prices.
How they manage to make, for example, "USS Dempsey" into 96 pages when
the wikipedia entry is maybe 2 pages is another question.
There's also "Alphascript" Publishing, with 67,000 results, and again 3
'editors', but different names.
I haven't checked for Deltascript or Gammascript.
I wonder
how the authors of that/those wikipedia articles feel about
this? I know
I'd be pretty annoyed if somedy did that with something I'd written.
If you post something on Wikipedia it remains yours but you've given
the world
a licence to do whatever the creative commons lincence and/or GNU docs
licence
allows them to do.
Which (I think) means that they can print it off in a book (as long as
there's
an appropriate attribuiton).
I'm not that bothered so I've not read the licences in detail (but I
would if
I were going to copy articles wholesale and sell them ...). In
general, if you
write something on Wikipedia it looks like you're trying to make it
available
to the world, so it's no big surprise to me that someone has done that.
That said, if I bought a book that turned out to be a reprint of one
of more
Wikipedia articles and it wasn't pretty clear up front that that was
going to
be the case, I'd certainly be miffed. But if I were the author of all
(or some)
of any of those articles, I don't think I'd be justified in
complaining much.