I've noticed a lot of crap e-books in Amazon lately that are comprised of Wikipedia or about.com style articles and selling for a few dollars. Some of them appear to be computer generated scrapings from PDFs, or some other unreliable method.

Make a killing publishing individual Wikipedia articles as ebooks...check.

I'm wondering:

1) Does the publisher have a right to this material, and to charge for it?

2) Is this material available elsewhere on the web?

3) Does Paul Graham or anyone else get compensated?

I would encourage anyone considering buying this sort of thing to know the answers to these questions before their purchase.