[Foundation-l] Juriwiki-l

Tue Apr 5 08:42:59 UTC 2005

Hello

A new mailing list was opened this week. Its name is Juriwiki-l at mail.wikimedia.org. Its moderator is Soufron.

Primary goals of the list
In the past few months, we observed an increasing need of legal counselling. Needs may be related to the following issues
* requests from editors or readers with regards to our content from a legal perspective (in particular copyright violations, defaming content etc...)
* setting up of new chapters (e.g. bylaws to write and discuss)
* contracts with other organisations (e.g. hosting contracts, CD Rom publishing contracts...)
* trademark issues (official request of trademarks, contracts allowing logo uses, recovery of lost domain names...)
* non-profit status, income revenue service...
* ...

Who can post to the list ?
Anyone may post to this list (at least, until we begin to have spamming issues)

Who will be member of the list ?
Only a limited number of people will receive the mails.
The recipiendaries will be
* the members of the WMF board (so, for now, Jimbo, Angela, Anthere, Tim and Michael)
* the presidents of local associations (currently, Ryo for the french board and Kurt for the german board)
* Legal advisors. For now, three have agreed to join, Soufron, Aurevilly and Michaël Snow. Others have been contacted but have not answered yet. Others might be soon contacted.

Why will be that list quite private ?
All of these issues may require input from professionals essentially, and many of them will require discretion. Hence the choice for a separate private mailing list.
Naturally, when some issues would be beneficial to be discussed in public, the discussions will occur on Foundation mailing list, or meta, or on the irc channel as usual. Similarly, when editors are directly involved in an issue, they will be put in copy of the mails exchanged on the juri list. The limited number of automatic recipiendaries is set up both to garantee discretion on certain topics, and to foster the creation of a team of legal advisors.

Will the number of members stay limited or can it increase ?
We hope that this number increase over the next months. If you are a regular editor of one of wikimedia project and are a professional in the legal field, you are most welcome to join the legal team (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/legal where we will try to keep information updated). If you are an editor and know another editor which could help, please tell us and contact him. We need help in this field, and the bigger we grow, the more help we will need. Obviously, help from several countries will be very helpful, in particular in countries where 1) there is or will be soon a local chapter or 2) we are setting up collaborations with local firms or organisations. 

Will the language be english only ?
Preferably, but when enough people share the same language to fix an issue essentially related to a specific country, another language than english should be used if that makes things easier. In this case, very short summaries could be added in english.

Could someone be removed from the list ?
Yes, in case of serious disruption or obvious legal inability. Except I, allowed to be both unable and disruptive :-)

How can you, as an editor or a developer, make use of this resource and help ?
Though this list is not kept secret, I'd like to ask you not to display it proeminently on projects. I think it would be best it is kept open for sending mails, but as soon as too much spam is received, we will have to restrict access. Similarly, this list is not meant to deal with all the daily complaints most projects receive. Most issues can be and should be dealt by editors (example, a person complaining of copyvio or the fact a site is not respecting fully our license... is everyone business and everyone should feel empowered to take care of it as much as possible). So, please, do not liberally hand out this address. However, when you think an issue is getting out of hand, require the board attention or input from a professional, please contact us.

What is the secondary goal of this list ?
Though we managed quite well till now, the growing number of legal threats on the biggest wikipedias suggest that one day or another, a threat will transform itself in a reality. Even if we are entirely in our right, we will need help to defend our case. It is best that we are organised and ready for it when it happens.
Secondly, it was reported more than once, that in front of "professionals", we needed to appear more business-like. Having good legal support in deals we are trying to negociate, should be very beneficial.
We are growing very fast. While we should not fall into bureaucracy, nor give positions which might reveal impossible to give to another one later on... or might cause diplomatic issues, I think it is important we organise team work around some issues. The legal team seemed one of the most required team right now.

There is a last point. Legal issues are amongst those activities which are essentially done behind the doors and I think most of you do not realise they are done at all ;-) Still, people like Aurevilly or Soufron (and others I do not mention here, Aurevilly and Soufron are those I know best) give a lot of this invisible time to the project. Others might have the ability to help... but just do not realise how they could do it. I hope that the existence of the team and of the list will help them realise where they could get involved.

Thank you for all those who give invisible work in any cases :-)

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