There is a guy by the name of Meir Shraga. I did not know him until today, but now I can even see his picture smiling at me from the knol he has published for the entry “Israel”. Mr. Shraga shamelessly copy-pasted the English Wikipedia entry on Israel. What cough my eye was the fact that he does not seem to give Wikipedia any credit (thereby probably violating the GFDL license terms), and since chutzpa knows no borders, he published his “piece” under a Creative Commons Attribution license. If there is anything that copyright law should curtail, it is this kind of behavior. Or even better, it seems that Mr. Shraga has succeeded very quickly to ruin his authorial reputation for good.
UPDATE: I have just realized that the default license for knol entries is Creative Commons Attribution v.3. This is very interesting, since it is not clear whether CC and GFDL licenses are compatible (i.e., whether you can cross-license, or “convert” GFDL content to CC content). It should be worthwhile to follow the developments in this respect. As a general matter, publishing content under CC licensing should be encouraged, provided, of course, that it is your content or that publishing it does not violate the rights of others.