Submission + - Is The Goncourt Prize Winner A CC BY-SA Work ? (observer.com)
frenchbedroom writes: A Frenchman called Florent Gallaire has published the entirety of French writer Michel Houellebecq's latest novel on the internet, claiming on his blog (if you don't understand French, please don't slashdot it) that it should be considered a Creative Commons work. Gallaire, a Master of Computer Science and Law, argues that Houellebecq lifted content from Wikipedia articles without citing the source in his Goncourt-awarded novel, "La carte et le territoire" (The Map and the Territory), a practice that the author himself has defended as a "patchwork". Houellebecq's ex-lawyer, Emmanuel Pierrat, has voiced his rebuttal of Gallaire's claims on French news site Rue89 (in French again), saying that Gallaire "quotes from a rule that applies only to contributors of [Wikipedia]. When one takes part in this collective work, one's speech is free. But this doesn't apply at all to the personal work of an individual inspired by the encyclopedia's articles."