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Baidu Baike is a Chinese wiki encyclopedia formed in 2006, provided by the Chinese search engine Baidu. In its "terms of use", Baidu Baike states that by adding content to the site, users agree to assign Baidu rights to their original contributions. It also states that users cannot violate intellectual property law, and that contributions which quote works held under the Creative Commons and/or GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) must follow the restrictions of those licenses. However, since these licenses (with the exception of CC0) prohibit removal of the original copyright notice, and Baike replaces it with "©2024 Baidu", the only way to "follow the restrictions of those licenses" is not to contribute this content at all, unless the quote is fair use or the contributor has the original rights-holder's permission to grant a separate non-exclusive license.

This issue was reported in mainstream media by PC World and PC Advisor in 2007.^[1][2] In March 2011, Wall Street Journal brought up this issue again when commenting on Baidu's "widespread copyright infringement".^[3]

The copyright violation by Baidu Baike is threefold:

1. Wikipedia releases its content under CC-by-sa-3.0 and GFDL licenses that require "Attribution". However, the staff at Baidu Baike proactively censors any edits that tried to list Wikipedia as reference or the source.
2. Creative Commons and GFDL also requires "Share-Alike" as a condition for reusing the text/images. However by adding "©2024 Baidu" symbol, Baidu Baike engages in copyfraud because it does not own the copyright of these texts and images.
3. When user requests the staff to delete a Baidu Baike article that violated Creative Commons license, the staff cited that Baidu Baike is an open-collaborative website so safe harbour provisions will apply. That staff also asked the person who made the complaint to correct the Baidu Baike article in question himself rather than deleting the article or informing the author in Baidu Baike that they have violated their terms of use.^{[4][dead link]}

So far, Baidu Baike reused text and images in Chinese, English, Japanese, and French Wikipedias without following the licensing conditions. The conservative number of articles plagiarized from the start (April 2006) to now are as follows:

• Plagiarized from English Wikipedia: 22 articles
• Plagiarized from Chinese Wikipedia: 2056 articles. This is broken down into:
  • Plagiarized 93 Featured articles
  • Plagiarized 104 Good articles
  • Plagiarized 171 DYKs
  • Plagiarized 1666 General articles
• Plagiarized from Cantonese Wikipedia: 1 article
• Plagiarized from Japanese Wikipedia: 19 articles
• Plagiarized from French Wikipedia: 1 article

This list is created to track down the articles being plagiarized by Baidu Baike. It is also used to prevent Baidu Baike from falsely claiming that articles in English Wikipedia were copied from Baidu Baike. First link of each entry is the English Wikipedia's articles and the second link is the corresponding article in Baidu Baike.

1. Acrocanthosaurus - Acrocanthosaurus
2. COMPUTEX Taipei - Computex
3. Reticle - Reticle
4. Edmond Locard - Edmond Locard
5. Bachata (music) - Bachata
6. Miwako Okuda - Miwako Okuda
7. Georgia Moffett - Georgia Moffett
8. Menthol - Menthol
9. Kevin Michael - Kevin Michael
10. Deen (band) - Deen
11. Lyudmila Prokasheva - Lyudmila Prokasheva
12. Soleil - Soleil (copied part of disambig page)
13. Christopher Wren - Christopher Wren
14. Final Watch Final Watch
15. Adıyaman - Adıyaman
16. Donald Norman - Donald Arthur Norman
17. Tesla turbine - Tesla turbine (Machine Translation)
18. Savannah (cat) - Savannah cat (Machine Translation)
19. Vengaboys - Vengaboys (just a paragraph)

day mth, 2011
Recently, some Wikipedians have sent a letter to Baidu, Inc. protesting the improper use of their contribution contents in Baidu Baike, an online encyclopedia project initiated by Baidu. Baidu has failed to follow CC-by-sa 3.0 or GFDL licenses under which Wikipedia's contents are shared.

They expressed their gladness to see the development of Baidu's user-oriented encyclopedia project in Chinese and Baidu's efforts to spread knowledge among the Chinese people. It is also the goal of the encyclopedia they edit, Wikipedia, to make the sum of human's knowledge freely available to everyone in the world. However, Baidu Baike has kept on infringing the copyright restrictions of Wikipedia, ignoring many complaints filed by Wikipedians.

Baidu Baike was founded in April 2006 and has more than 3 million articles at present. Among these articles, however, more than 1,600 contain text or images from Chinese, English, and Japanese Wikipedias, according to Wikipedians' investigations. They were used in a way against the license adopted by Wikipedia and therefore violating copyright of Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia releases its content under CC-by-sa-3.0 and GFDL licenses that require "Share Alike" and "Attribution", while Baidu Baike never declares to be using these licenses. Even "© current year Baidu" can be found at the bottom of all of its encyclopedia pages, which indicates that Baidu reserves all rights. In addition, even if all the content submitted is copied from Wikipedia, according to some Baidu Baike users, Baidu will censor any edit that tries to list Wikipedia as a reference. It seems as if Baidu fails to notice obvious copyright violations in Baidu Baike. In comparison, content submitted to Wikipedia that is copied from Baidu Baike will be deleted without any delay. Despite Baidu Baike's terms of use which states that the users who post contents on the website should be held responsible in case of copyright violation lawsuits, Baidu, Inc., as the runner of Baidu Baike, also have undeniable responsiblities for such severe legal issues.

Once again, some Chinese Wikipedians have sent a letter to Baidu and asked them to take action against the serious copyright issues existing in Baidu Baike. They also included a list of all known copyright violations by Baidu Baike to avoid being considered violating the rights of Baidu Baike instead, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Baidu_Baike and http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BD. They implore the media and the press to assist in reporting this issue and make it known to the general public.

About Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the largest project run by Wikimedia Foundation. "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment." This is how Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, interprets the mission of Wikipedia.

About Wikipedia copyright

Wikipedia uses CC-by-sa-3.0 and GFDL licenses in its content. They can be found at the following pages.

• CC-by-sa-3.0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License
• GFDL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License

Press contact

Please visit: Contact us at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us.

Please note that this press release is issued by some Wikipedian, but not the Wikimedia Foundation or any its local chapter. Also, it may not reflect to the whole Wikipedia community.

List of articles which is copied to Baidu Baike from Wikipedia

Please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Baidu_Baike for more details.