Techdirt. Stories filed under "wiki"

Russia Blacklists Cultural Wiki Without Explanation, Site Just Moves To Circumvent Block

Glyn Moody — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 07:33:32 PST

Techdirt has been following the worsening censorship situation in Russia for some time. Back in July, the country's parliament passed a new law ostensibly designed to "protect the children". It took only a couple of weeks before it was used to shut down the whole of LiveJournal for part of the country. That was apparently because a neo-Nazi blog had been found among the thousands of others hosted there -- an indication of just how blunt this new instrument of censorship is.

Now another popular site in Russia has been taken down, as Rick Falkvinge reports:

This Monday, the Russian Government placed a Russian Wikipedia clone on a censorship blacklist. The Russian Government maintains such a kill switch for "harmful sites" – motivated with protecting children from drug use, child porn, or suicide methods. In reality, as usual, give anybody such a switch and they’ll shut off things they plain don’t like.

The Russian Wikipedia clone Lurkomore has long been a Wikipedia-on-steroids in Russia. With the notability requirement for articles relaxed, Lurkomore had become an "encyclopedia of contemporary culture, folklore, and subcultures, as well as everything else".

Presumably there is something among the thousands of articles there that someone, somewhere has taken a dislike to, causing the entire site to be blocked. However, an article on the site Lenta.ru (original in Russian) says that the people behind Lurkomore still don't know what that was, and intend to appeal against being placed on the censorship blacklist in this way. In the meantime, they have moved the site to a different IP address, at lurkmore.to, where it can presumably be accessed even by Russian children -- thus neatly demonstrating the futility of this kind of hamfisted censorship.

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Linden Lab Gets Legal With Helpful Resource On Using Second Life For Education

Mike Masnick — Fri, 2 Oct 2009 13:09:59 PDT

Chalk up another victory for trademark bullying. Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, apparently just got around to registering certain Second Life trademarks, but wasted no time using them to shove around at least one site that was only helping to get more people to use Second Life. Game Politics points us to the news that the operator of the Second Life in Education Wiki was on the receiving end of a legal nastygram. This is, frankly, dumb.

The site has been around for over two years without an issue, and helps educators better understand ways to use Second Life as a tool for education. It's clearly put together outside of the auspices of Linden Lab, but is a useful tool for educators who want to use the virtual world. It's the sort of thing Linden Lab should be encouraging. No "moron in a hurry" would go to the wiki and think that it was run by Linden Lab. Linden Lab's lawyers will, of course, claim that they have to monitor uses of their marks to avoid it going generic, but that's a cop out. They do not need to go after anyone who uses the mark in any way. In a case like this, where it's clearly an educational tool, not being used to describe a different or competing platform, there's no issue. Still, the operator of the site has decided it's not worth fighting, and will be changing the name of the site and moving it to a different domain. Too bad. Another win for needless trademark bullying.

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Apple Withdraws Lawsuit Against Wiki Site Owner Over iPhone/iPod Interoperability Hack Discussion

Mike Masnick — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:19:20 PDT

Last November, the EFF took Apple to task for threatening the owner of a wiki site. Apple claimed that an ongoing discussion on the site about how to build interoperability between iPods and iPhones and alternative software other than iTunes violated the DMCA -- which requires quite a novel interpretation of the DMCA. After Apple refused to back down, EFF sued in April. Somewhere along the way, it looks like Apple's lawyers started to realize that it had pretty close to no chance whatsoever and has now withdrawn this particular threat. The EFF is dropping the lawsuit, but isn't pleased that the whole thing had to happen in the first place:

"While we are glad that Apple retracted its baseless legal threats, we are disappointed that it only came after 7 months of censorship and a lawsuit," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Because Apple continues to use technical measures to lock iPod Touch and iPhone owners into -- and Palm Pre owners out of -- using Apple's iTunes software, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more discussions among frustrated customers about reverse engineering Apple products. We hope Apple has learned its lesson here and will give those online discussions a wide berth in the future."

Indeed. While the Palm Pre situation is in the other direction (interop between alternative hardware and iTunes software, rather than alternative software with Apple hardware), it shows again that Apple will do whatever possible to stop people from making legal use of products they purchased.

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Putting Ideas And Inventions Into The Public Domain

Mike Masnick — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 10:59:54 PDT

A few months back, we wondered why it was so difficult to opt out of copyright. Soon after that, Creative Commons added its CC0 license, which gets you a long way towards putting your content in the public domain (there are a few issues related to it, but it's better than nothing). With patents, the issue isn't quite the same. With copyright, you're automatically given a copyright on creative works. Obviously, that's not the case with patents. However, people have wondered how they can put their invention in the public domain, such that (a) others can benefit from it and (b) it prevents others from patenting it at a later date. Tragically, the US Patent Office tends to look pretty narrowly at what counts as prior art and requires that the information be "published," (something that is also defined very narrowly) so simply declaring an invention to be in the public domain isn't always good enough to prevent others from making a claim on it.

I was thinking about the Slashdot post above for a bit, wondering if it was worth writing this post up, when someone else pointed out that some folks have now set up Public Domain Ideas, a wiki designed for just this purpose: to put your ideas into the public domain by publishing them in that wiki. There have been some efforts in the past to create a database of obviousness, but that's pretty difficult. The big problem with obvious ideas is that they're often so obvious, no one even thinks to put them down, until it's too late, and someone has patented an "invention" based on that idea. But the idea of a wiki for public domain ideas is much more interesting -- if people really do decide to make use of it -- and if the Patent Office recognizes it as a source of published inventions for prior art. In the meantime, if you've got some good ideas to share, why not check it out?

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Wikia's Search Strategy Heavy On Buzzwords And FUD

Joseph Weisenthal — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:41:33 PDT

Wikia, Jimmy Wales' for-profit venture, has been talking for awhile about taking on Google in the search space. The company believes it can do better by augmenting traditional algorithm-based search with wiki-like collaboration and human editors. So far, the company doesn't have anything to show for its efforts, but it recently announced the purchase of the open source web crawler Grub from LookSmart (remember them?). As part of the company's PR efforts, Wales has tried to make the case that existing search tools are "broken" and that another party needs to come along and fix it. This same line, that Google is broken for whatever reasons, gets repeated by every fledgling search startup out there. While Google has its share of problems (spam, etc.), it's unlikely that most users would see things as being so bad. In the end, neither FUD nor buzzwords, like "wiki", "open source" or "semantic web" will be enough to dethrone Google if the underlying product isn't clearly superior.

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