[WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

Tue May 10 15:25:28 UTC 2005

Our policy is NPOV, not "Caution and kindness." If we do NPOV
correctly, then it shouldn't be a problem -- nobody will blame
Wikipedia itself for what it says, they'll blame the Usenet forum or
academic book or whatever.

The lack-of-lawyers is actually a serious concern which I suspect will
become a major problem at some point in the future if Wikipedia
continues to become larger and larger. The structure of many laws
relevant to what we do here is such that Wikipedia can be up shit
creek pretty quickly if somebody with money and influence wanted us to
be. For example, "fair use" is only a *defensive* clause in the USA --
you can only really claim it if you are sued for copyright violation.
It is not an offensive statement -- we cannot tell people they are
"violating our fair use." What this means is that, even if we are in
the right, it would be extremely easy for a company like Disney to
grind us to a halt through a lawsuit -- the lawyer's fees alone would
cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. "We removed them immediately
after you sent us a letter," WP plead to Walt. "Well, that's too bad
-- I want back-royalties," he replies. And so in the best of
situations, WP hires lawyers, they plead fair use and win, and then WP
just owes the lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Worst of
situations, WP owes both Disney AND the lawyers money, who knows how
much.

I don't see any good way around this. It is less a problem of
Wikipedia itself (though I'd be very careful of "fair use" because of
the way it is structured in US law), as it is with the ability of the
big and powerful to wage legal war even on principles they are in the
wrong on. It's more of a maddening thought than it is a sobering one.

FF

On 5/5/05, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Wikipedia has become an incredibly powerful medium but we don't have
> any kind of an ethical code for cases like this. We have no lawyers,
> no heirarchy of editors, no fact-checking procedures: none of the
> infrastructure of large, powerful news organizations, and yet we have
> arguably as much power as some of them. It's a sobering thought. All
> I'm arguing is that we should take that power seriously, and never
> abuse it; and if a private person complains that we have, where
> there's no public-interest issue involved, we should err on the side
> of caution and kindness, because we lose nothing by doing that, but
> the person being criticized might lose a lot if we don't (regardless
> of the details of this particular case: I'm talking generally).
> 
> Sarah
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