Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks/Baidu Baike

This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. This page might not appropriately reflect the current situation with Baidu Baike. Its factual accuracy is disputed. It was last substantively updated 11 May 2018‎.

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]}