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.