Jimmy Wales wrote:
One caveat that I would like to introduce here is that
we do want
Wikipedia to be easily redistributable in the majority of countries
around the world. Therefore _some_ concession to non-U.S. law is
warranted in _some_ cases.
But really, this sort of discussion is generally just fun abstraction,
since I'm not sure that there are really that many cases in which the
copyright or censorship laws of the countries we're most interested in
actually restrict us much.
I doubt very much whether anyone will be able to legally sell
Wikipedia 1.0 on a streetcorner in North Korea, nor do I think we can
seriously entertain the sort of self-censorship that would be required
in order to make that happen.
This is sort of a tangential issue, but it seems copyright issues might
indeed pose a major problem for a Wikipedia 1.0. It's quite possible
that we have not caught all the copyright-violating articles submitted
to Wikipedia (though we do catch a lot of them), and it's further quite
possible that the copyright holders who haven't yet noticed will notice
once a higher-profile Wikipedia 1.0 is released. At this time they may
inform us of the copyright violation, and ask us to remove the offending
material. Doing so from the website is trivial, but it would also force
us to stop distributing Wikipedia 1.0 until a modified version without
the copyright violation has been prepared. This could be disastrous for
attempts to produce a paper or CD-ROM version, as any inventory copies
have to be destroyed and a new print run prepared. If we got, say,
three copyright violation notices spaced a month or so apart, it would
effectively make it impossible to distribute Wikipedia in such a form,
since the costs of starting a new print run each time would become
prohibitive. And it's not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that
we might receive more in the neighorhood of a dozen such notices.
-Mark