Received the following email from Nicolas at Actualitté:
As you may know, there is a big mistake in France about the piracy of Michel Houellebcq’s last book, La carte et le territoire.
In fact, a lawyer décided to provide free ebook version, because the book contains few extracts from Wikipedia.
And due to the licence of the free encyclopedia, the lawyer thinks the book has the same condition of utilisation – licence Creative Commons BY-SA, so he made a PDF free version of the book.Our news
http://www.actualitte.com/dossiers/1228-houellebecq-pirater-creative-commons-wikipedia.htm
and an organisation called Libre Accès published few more news about this (publishing, copyright, authors and… ACTA)
http://www.actualitte.com/actualite/22939-houellebecq-acta-propriete-intellectuelle-licence.htmThe publishing house of Houellebecq, Flammarion, said there will be a trial to prevent the free version of the ebook to be released….
The Google Translation is a bit ropey – but if Mr Houellebcq has taken a substantial part of a Wikipedia article and reprinted it in his book then he has four options
1) Release his work as Creative Commons (he’s then in accordance with the terms of Wikipedia’s CC license)
2) Negotiate a different license with the authors of the Wikipedia Articles
3) Get sued
3a) Run a Fair Use/Fair Dealing defence
Using part of a Creative Commons work (like a Wikipedia article) in your own book doesn’t automatically make your book Creative Commons – It just means you don’t have a valid copyright license to reprint the bit you’ve “borrowed” from Wikipedia, and can be sued for infringing the copyright in the Wikipedia article. The lawyer who is distributing the ebook is infringing on Mr Houellebecq’s copyright just as much as Mr Houellebecq was infringing the copyright of the Wikipedia article authors.
Option 2 is a tricky one because it’s difficult to determine who the “authors” of an individual Wikipedia entry are. The only thing you know about them is that they’ve all agreed to license their work under CC-BY-SA. If you don’t abide by the terms of that license, it’s incumbent on you to track down every substantive contributor and reach a licensing agreement with them.