Internet, Translation, and Copyright

yeeyan.com is a web site dedicated to translating articles, web pages, and electronic books on the Internet from languages other than Chinese (mainly English) into Chinese. It went online in the end of July 2006, when two of my friends (Thunder and Dingding) and I started translating online essays written in English. At the beginning, the site was a blog, built using Wordpress. After Thunder and I translated Chris' classical essay "The Long Tail", we gradually attracted some loyal Chinese readers; some were willing to join us. We felt that a blog site wasn't enough.

In three months we built up a new site from a scratch. The visual style of the new site is pretty like - an SNS where users exchange opinions of books, music, and movies. Yes, our new site is indeed an SNS: anyone who volunteers to contribute his/her time, language skills and domain knowledge, can join us; readers can comment; we have ranking system and recommendation system; we have groups and discussion boards, and even internal mail system which we call YMail. Our slogan is: Together, we smash the language barriers and explore the entire Web world.

Today we are on our way toward the goal: within 40 days, about 40 translators posted more than 150 articles on the site; the areas have been expanded from IT and startups to investment, personal finance, general science, social issues, health & medicare, online video, travel, and even automobiles. The average Alexa rank is around 30,000 after the launch of the new site.

So far we haven't run into any serious copyright issues yet. We always recommend our translators to contact original authors first. Some high profile bloggers, such as Guy Kawasaki, granted us permissions to translate their articles. Seth Godin, in the communication with one of our active users, Anbudangche, allowed us to translate the electronic version of his book "The Bootstrapper's Bible". Shortly after that, another user Sinishell also got "go-ahead" from Trent on his series "31 Days to Fix Your Finances". Currently, a number of translators are working collaboratively on these projects; we even got volunteered users as proofreaders.

The only episode happened when I translated Wikipedia's page about Seth Godin as an introduction of the author of "The Bootstarpper's Bible" as well as a series of books, such as "Permission Marketing", "Purple Cow", "The Big Moo", "Unleashing the Ideavirus", ... After I posted the translation, Mountain, who is a Web administrator of Wikipedia China and a regular reader of our site, pointed out that I didn't strictly follow the instructions on Wikipedia's license page. So I went to the page, read the instructions, and added a sentence at the beginning of my translation, claiming the origination of the article and GFDL license.

Bloggers embody the spirit of freedom. Their happiness is maximized when more readers can reach what they write. They blog not for money (at least not directly), but for fun, for honors, for spreading their knowledge and ideas. Wikipedia is along the same line.

However, not all web sites, not all web content providers have the same spirit. Recently, I was intending to start a new column on yeeyan that talks about business and society. My wife helped me to collect some cases; but finally I figured out that most of them were from The Wall Street Journal Online, and might cause copyright infringement - a big problem for us. So, I had to give up my idea temporarily.

Internet is one of the greatest innovations in human history. It's a revolution! Information propagation has evolved from paper age into Internet age, and can never be as easy and fast as it is right now. Copyright, to the contrary, prevents free propagation of information and knowledge. Though aimed at protecting the interests of original authors, copyright had long fallen into the dark side and become a dirty weapon for business monopolies to gain huge profits.

The conflict of Internet and copyright is inevitable. OCILLA tries to resolve the conflict, but the issue can't be resolved unless the copyright owners can find a way that follows the Internet trend to make the distribution of digital media content much faster and cheaper. Today, Yahoo's Music JukeBox and Apple's iTunes both charge 99 cents for downloading a song from their sites. I myself am not a big music fan, but I do have downloaded a song (Dixie Chicks' "Landslide") from JukeBox. The song was beautiful, downloading was easy and fast, and the cost was a chicken feed to me. Thanks to Internet, I have more flexibility on paying for copyright that I believe deserve the cost. Though the profit for the labels is still huge, as long as I can afford it and feel comfortable, I have no complaints.

Back to my original plan of creating a new column about business and society on our site, my questions are: why can't those articles be distributed and used for derivative works for free? What interests does the copyright protect in this situation? Is the social benefit more valuable than the subscription fee if we allow free access and propagation?