Via The Coffee, reports that a new coffee table book published by PDP Digital and our own Department of Tourism may just have lifted entire passages verbatim without attribution from Wikipedia articles on individual provinces in the Philippines. You can read about it here. There may be a perception that Wikipedia articles enjoy no copyright protection. In fact, Wikipedia articles are copyrighted automatically under the Berne Convention and formally licensed to the public under a GNU Free Documentation License. Under this license, all previous authors of the work must be attributed.
This is the second instance of tasteless lifting from Wikipedia I've noticed this week. When Paraluman died last Monday, the ABS-CBN online report on her death stated, rather daftly, that she was a contemporary of both "Fernando Poe, Sr. and Marlene Dauden". I was bemused by that highly eccentric joinder of names and the somewhat skewed perspective, moreso since Paraluman and Dauden did not seem to have any notable connection. (FP Sr., on the other hand, supposedly gave Paraluman her screen name, and ABS-CBN cited Wikipedia in reporting that claim) True enough, Paraluman's Wikipedia entry at the time of her death did provide the Paraluman-Dauden framing device, which ABS-CBN should have ignored when it prepared its own report. (Speaking of skewed Wikipedia entries, Marlene Dauden's is a stunner)
Last year, I was reading an Inquirer opinion column on the founder of the U.P. College of Law, George Malcolm, whose Wikipedia article I created. I noticed that the sequence of biographical tidbits were highly familiar, and true enough, they were drawn from Malcolm's Wikipedia article. Nonetheless, Mr. Tan apparently strove with the aid of his thesaurus to rephrase the article's sentences, interjecting his own insights here and there, and I had no issue at all with the intellectual integrity of his column.
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