When Kazakhstan released a brand new 500 tenge bill (about US$1.50), a Swiss photographer named Marcel Burkhard noticed something odd about the bird on the face of the bill. It looked exactly like the bird that he had uploaded to Wikipedia on December 3, 2005, as User:Cele4. The photo is the lead image at ru:Чайковые and that photo is alleged to have been lifted by the Kazakhstan Central Bank and placed on their bill. The bank has denied all accusations of plagiarism, but has announced that they would change the bill "in time".
The bird is just one of the many times that Wikipedia content has been plagiarized (see previous Signpost coverage). People from editors at BuzzFeed, to an American senator, to the Pentagon, to Oxford University Press have all lifted content from Wikipedia. ( Global Voices)
Podcast This American Life presented " So a Monkey and a Horse Walk Into a Bar" featuring a narrative of how Wikimedia projects have presented the monkey selfie copyright dispute along with a conversation with photographer David Slater. Persons interested in the issue can read past coverage in The Signpost. At least hundreds and perhaps a few thousand Wikimedia community members engaged in conversation about the monkey selfie dispute in 2014 or later. Because of the controversy around this issue, this commentator at The Signpost will speak only for themselves in making the following observations about what is striking about this podcast:
“ | The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. ... Examples: A photograph taken by a monkey. | ” |
— https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium.pdf |
When Kazakhstan released a brand new 500 tenge bill (about US$1.50), a Swiss photographer named Marcel Burkhard noticed something odd about the bird on the face of the bill. It looked exactly like the bird that he had uploaded to Wikipedia on December 3, 2005, as User:Cele4. The photo is the lead image at ru:Чайковые and that photo is alleged to have been lifted by the Kazakhstan Central Bank and placed on their bill. The bank has denied all accusations of plagiarism, but has announced that they would change the bill "in time".
The bird is just one of the many times that Wikipedia content has been plagiarized (see previous Signpost coverage). People from editors at BuzzFeed, to an American senator, to the Pentagon, to Oxford University Press have all lifted content from Wikipedia. ( Global Voices)
Podcast This American Life presented " So a Monkey and a Horse Walk Into a Bar" featuring a narrative of how Wikimedia projects have presented the monkey selfie copyright dispute along with a conversation with photographer David Slater. Persons interested in the issue can read past coverage in The Signpost. At least hundreds and perhaps a few thousand Wikimedia community members engaged in conversation about the monkey selfie dispute in 2014 or later. Because of the controversy around this issue, this commentator at The Signpost will speak only for themselves in making the following observations about what is striking about this podcast:
“ | The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. ... Examples: A photograph taken by a monkey. | ” |
— https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium.pdf |
Discuss this story
- The article discussing This American Life is rather silly and insensitive. It laments "why oh why does Slater conflate Wikipedia with the WMF. Oh, how we're misunderstood!" Perhaps this
photo might explain why.
Kingsindian ♝ ♚ 12:20, 22 December 2017 (UTC) replyI understand that Slater feels victimized by a quirk in the law which he thinks is deeply unfair -- but at a certain point, if your life hasn't been ruined, and you still have your health, your family, and your job, then eventually you kind of have to realize that your persistence in a lost cause is ending up affecting you more than it does anyone else. In any case, his plight has very little to do with the Internet or Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but with the dusty tomes of traditional old-style law... Anyway, PETA acted far more obnoxiously than anyone on Wikipedia/Wikimedia. AnonMoos ( talk) 13:00, 27 December 2017 (UTC) reply
I thought I’d have a look at this Everipedia”. I chose my hometown of Homer, Alaska as a sample article. And....wait for it... it’s a copy of the Wikipedia article in every way. So... what was the point again? Beeblebrox ( talk) 22:37, 30 December 2017 (UTC) reply