Tianzhu, the core developer of Egg.js (Alibaba's open-source enterprise-level Node.js framework), issued a statement today: "Explanation on My Personal "Malicious Complaint" about Unauthorized Reprinting of Others" .
The cause of the incident was that the developer ( @an168bang521 ) posted that he was informed of infringement by Zhihu for excerpting the technical documentation of Ali's open source software Egg.js on GitHub , and received an "infringement notification letter" from the company entrusted by Zhihu.
Seeing this, you may have questions: Zhihu will also help protect the rights of open source technical documents?
But in fact, it's not.
Tianzhu, the core maintainer of Egg.js, responded that the so-called "infringement notification letter" is because their column on Zhihu has authorized the platform's copyright service. When the Zhihu platform detects that the corresponding article has been reproduced without authorization, it will Automatically send infringement notices .
Tianzhu said that the document he wrote has been published in the Egg.js Zhihu column and the Egg.js GitHub repo document library.
- 2018-04-05 Posted to Zhihu column , when Egg encounters TypeScript, he harvests a tea egg (hereinafter referred to as document A)
- Because of the good response, everyone felt that it could be directly integrated into the official documentation, so it was merged in 2018-04-16 , History for docs/source/zh-cn/tutorials/typescript.md - eggjs/egg (hereinafter referred to as document B )
Summarized as follows:
- Know the column article address: Tianzhu: When Egg encounters TypeScript, harvest a tea egg
- Egg official document address: TypeScript - Egg
- Suspected infringing personal website: https://www.axihe.com/edu/egg/tutorials/typescript.html
The contents of document A and document B are basically the same. According to @an168bang521 , the content judged to be infringing by Zhihu was transferred from document B - using the MIT License .
@an168bang521 believes that his website is indeed the original document that reproduced Egg.js. But Egg.js uses the MIT License - allowing anyone to use and operate under the MIT license. Hence his point of view that " substantial use of the documentation in this repository is subject to use, reproduction, modification, incorporation, publication, distribution, sublicense and/or sale within MIT ".
He also said:
"Since the Ali Egg.js group has used the MIT License on Github, telling everyone that it can be used freely within the scope permitted by the agreement, then our users have this right; now the members of the Ali Egg.js group are known by domestic knowledge. The original content on the platform was used as the basis to sue me for infringement; the description received was: I used his Zhihu account work without authorization, which seriously violated the right of information network dissemination and caused great damage to his legitimate rights and interests. I feel that this It's disgusting to have two diametrically opposed behaviors."
Tianzhu received a private consultation letter sent by @an168bang521 on Zhihu last night, but I didn't expect the person concerned to post it on the Internet for dissemination, and because the person concerned did not express it clearly, Tianzhu received a lot of "crusade" remarks.
Now, according to the expressions of both parties, let's sort out the events:
- Many years ago, Tianzhu wrote a document about a certain feature of Egg.js, and published it on Zhihu (document A) and GitHub (document B).
- Document A and Document B have much of the same content
- The copyright of document A has been authorized to Zhihu
- Document B uses the MIT License
- According to the MIT License adopted by Egg.js, @an168bang521 reprinted document B from GitHub to his personal website without notifying Tianzhu .
- Since Tianzhu's Zhihu column has been authorized to Zhihu's copyright service, Zhihu platform detected @an168bang521's unauthorized reprinting of content, and as Tianzhu's agent, sent an "infringement notice" to @an168bang521 .
- @an168bang521 consulted Tianzhu about the "infringement notification letter", saying that the documents he moved from the GitHub repository were similar to Tianzhu's Zhihu column. The reason why I moved it is because I saw that Egg.js adopts the MIT License, so I want to know whether this situation constitutes infringement.
- @an168bang521 posted a post in the technical community: "I want to ask the old buddies who understand the law, is it considered an infringement to extract the content of the technical documentation of Alibaba's open source software Egg.js ", which led to Tianzhu receiving a lot of "crusade" remarks.
- Tianzhu responded: "Explanation on My Personal "Malicious Complaint" about Unauthorized Reprinting of Others" .
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