I’m heading out the door to the Columbia forum this evening, but this is pretty big news for China Internet watchers.

Yahoo Settles Lawsuit Over Jailed Chinese Dissidents

By Catherine Rampell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 13, 2007; 2:29 PM

Yahoo settled today with the families of two Chinese dissidents imprisoned after the company helped identify them to the Chinese government. The terms of the settlement was not disclosed, and Yahoo did not admit fault, an attorney for the families said.

More analysis will follow I’m sure. I look forward to Rebecca MacKinnon’s analysis, as she’s been carefully blogging about this issue.

Business Week has a writeup of Baidu’s Wikipedia “competitor” Baidu Baike, which is a creation of the largest search engine company in China. It says it’s been around for 19 months, and lifts content from Wikipedia’s Chinese edition without proper attribution and inclusion of the GNU Free Documentation License. Since Chinese Wikipedia is blocked in China, it’s no surprise Baidu Baike is the most popular online encyclopedia in China.

Today, Baidu Baike is the leading encyclopedia online in China, and the second-largest Net encyclopedia anywhere, after the English-language version of Wikipedia. But the company has drawn fire for its success from some critics who say it has been built on copyright violations and complicity with government censorship. Wikipedia clearly believes that Baidu has crossed an ethical line, although the American company is planning no legal action to stop what it believes is plagiarism on the part of Baidu. “We only appeal to their moral judgment about what is right,” says Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in an e-mail interview.

When I met one of Baidu’s program managers a few months ago, I told her I’d be interested in talking to folks from Baidu Baike, just to let them know how to conform to the GFDL. It was actually fine to copy Wikipedia’s content, and also to censor stuff they don’t like, as long as they complied with the GFDL.

She got back to me saying Baidu’s folks on that side were “scared” of talking to folks involved with Wikipedia, after the strong comments by Wikimedia Foundation chairperson Florence Nibart-Devouard:

“They do not respect the licence at all,” said Florence Nibart-Devouard, chair of the Board of Trustees at the Wikimedia Foundation, during an interview at the Wikimania 2007 conference in Taipei. “That might be the biggest copyright violation we have. We have others,” she added.

It’s too bad.

It’s not hard to comply with the GFDL, but they seem to be scared of the litigation risk. The thing going for Baidu is that the Foundation cannot bring a lawsuit, since the Foundation only hosts the hardware and the site. Any lawsuit would have to come from authors who have been “harmed” by Baidu’s noncompliance. That’s not bound to happen anytime soon.

I plan to make another attempt to open up a dialogue with the folks at the company to simply explain how the GFDL works. Baidu’s a NASDAQ-listed company, so there is some “face” aspect of having it conform to the license that other prominent Wikipedia mirrors have complied with.

I’ll be in NYC this week to be on “The Changing Media Landscape” panel of the Hearst New Media lectures at Columbia University. It’s a nice homecoming to the place where I helped start the entire new media modernization of the Journalism school in 1994.
I’m glad to see more international representation than in years past, as the panel will consist of:

• Josh Cohen, business product manager, Google News (coming from the
  Googleplex)
• Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan, an Iranian-born blogger,
  journalist, and Internet activist (coming from Toronto)
• Jonathan Dube, director of digital programming, CBC (coming from Toronto)
• Andrew Lih, author of a new book on Wikipedia and expert on Chinese media
  (coming from Beijing)
• Mindy McAdams, new media education pioneer and professor at University of
  Florida (coming from Gainesville)
• Michael Rogers, resident futurist of The New York Times (coming from
  midtown)

Hope to see some familiar faces in the crowd.

Good to know:

The organisers of the Beijing Olympics have denied that secret pig-breeding centres have been set up to ensure pork supplied to international athletes will be safe to eat. They were responding to reports that the official pork supplier for the Games had set up a dozen special breeding farms where bans on additives, including growth hormones and steroids, were strictly enforced. A Games spokesman said steps to improve food safety were welcome, but he denied that organisers had demanded that specially “pampered” Olympic pigs be put on the menu for athletes during the Games.

For folks who frequently travel, news about a decline in U.S. tourism is not a surprise given the frustrations of security searches, tiny small bottles, rude immigration officers and an infuriating visa process. The stats are discouraging.

The number of foreign visitors to the United States has plummeted since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington because foreigners don’t feel welcome, tourism professionals said Thursday.

“Since September 11, 2001, the United States has experienced a 17 percent decline in overseas travel, costing America 94 billion dollars in lost visitor spending, nearly 200,000 jobs and 16 billion dollars in lost tax revenue,” the Discover America advocacy campaign said in a statement. [link]

Interestingly, at the same time the process of travelling to China has improved greatly. The immigration and security checks at the China border are faster and more courteous. At the metal detectors, all the body frisking is done by young female security officers. Female travellers appreciate that, and as for male travellers, (cough) it’s the highlight of their trip.

Compared to the US passport check, they’ve actually inverted the model when it comes to customer service. Every immigration official at the Beijing airport immigration has a “rate this officer” box so you can punch one of four buttons to give your satisfaction score. Since it’s been installed, the lines move considerably faster.

I can’t imagine United States DHS doing this any time soon.

Rate your Chinese immigration officer

Financial Times is reporting that Yahoo! in the United States has finally admitted it was not forthcoming in the case of handing over information that got journalist Shi Tao jailed in China.

When Yahoo executive Michale Callahan testified in front of Congress, February 15, 2006, he said that “we” (Yahoo as a collective entity it seems) did not know the nature of the investigation:

The Shi Tao case raises profound and troubling questions about basic human rights. Nevertheless, it is important to lay out the facts. When Yahoo! China in Beijing was required to provide information about the user, who we later learned was Shi Tao, we had no information about the nature of the investigation. Indeed, we were unaware of the particular facts surrounding the case until the news story emerged. [link]

Now Callahan admits Yahoo “had additional information.”

A top Yahoo official who has come under fire for the company’s role in the 2004 imprisonment of a dissident in China apologised on Thursday for failing to tell US lawmakers that Yahoo knew more about the case than he initially acknowledged in testimony last year.

Michael Callahan, Yahoo’s executive vice president and general counsel, said in a statement ahead of a congressional hearing next week that he “realised” that Yahoo had additional information about the nature of the probe into one of its users, Shi Tao, a journalist now serving a 10-year prison sentence in China, months after he testified that Yahoo had “no information” about the investigation.

Apparently, they are putting the blame on a communication breakdown between the US office and China operations.

“Months after I testified before two House subcommittees on Yahoo’s approach to business in China, I realised Yahoo had additional information about a 2004 order issued by the Chinese government seeking information about a Yahoo China user,” Mr Callahan said in the statement. […]

“I neglected to directly alert the committee of this new information and that oversight led to a misunderstanding that I deeply regret and have apologised to the committee for creating,” Mr Callahan said.

He added that in consultations with committee staff they agreed that his 2006 testimony was “truthful”.

He is expected to testify that a lawyer for Yahoo in Asia failed to brief him on the order because the lawyer did not believe it was significant.

It’s good to see Yahoo finally acknowledge what was so painfully obvious after documents were released that proved their Congressional testimony was erroneous. But there are still questions going forward.

Yahoo could still be vulnerable to future human rights-related cases involving Yahoo China, since Alibaba’s boss, Jack Ma, made no secret of his willingness to co-operate closely with Beijing’s authorities and with any investigations into users.

For some of the best reporting and analysis of this, make sure to read Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog posts from earlier this year, and Roland Soong’s post about the Shi Tao case.