[Foundation-l] Copyright issues...walking on thin ice

Sun Aug 8 02:58:22 UTC 2004

Someone will sue somewhere. Someone will win
somewhere. Either Wikimedia will say "we are an
American NPO - we exist under the American
(self-lauditory, self-preserving, self-centered)
protectionist system. Exactly how many nukes do *you
have?" If that somewhere is the USA, and free speech,
public good, and fair use are slapped down in the name
of tyrannical property and human puppetry, then WP
must go underground: Imagine a decentralized
peer-to-peer network that exchanges article edits, run
on light clients on any number of systems around the
world... Anyway, thats for later. 

For now, the good that the project provides outweighs
almost any claim of "damages," and like Ray said,
(typed rather) judgements are made on a case by case
basis and are unsually limited to profits. Who poses a
danger? What philosophical grounds are they standing
on? What claim to property do they have that trancends
fair use? What would be the harm in a lost verdict?
Win-win all around, IMHO.

ReLaX.

S

--- mbecker <mbecker at jumpingjackweb.com> wrote:

> Again, I've been gone for quite a while. Has there
> been a consensus by the community that we should
> start using copyrighted material in wikipedia? Even
> if this is fair use, what's stopping the copyright
> holders from suing the wikimedia foundation, and
> incurring a great deal of legal fees? 

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