[Foundation-l] Board meeting in Rotterdam later this week

Fri Jan 19 21:19:39 UTC 2007

Delirium schreef:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>   
>> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>> The biggest error that I see is that people with not enough knowledge 
>>> about the law make the policy. 
>>>
>>>     
>>>       
>> Yes.
>>   
>>     
>
> While true, it's worth recalling the reason for the general anti-lawyer 
> backlash among communities of this sort: That in normal 
> corporate/foundation/business practice, when left to the legal 
> department things almost never get approved because of the legal risk.  
> Wikipedia as a project would never have been approved at all by any 
> reasonable corporation's legal department, because the legal issues are 
> far too risky to countenance.  We recklessly went ahead and started 
> building it anyway, and figured we'd tackle the legal issues as they arose.
>
> That doesn't mean we shouldn't defer to lawyers where useful and 
> necessary, but the general "ecology" is one of tension between legal 
> caution on the one hand and a desire to produce a useful encyclopedia on 
> the other hand.
>
> -Mark
Hoi,
It is very nice to look at it from the perspective of a single legal 
practice ie the American one. When you look how things are, you have to 
acknowledge that the German chapter was taken to court and not the 
Foundation. Luckily the German chapter behaved in a proper way and did 
well. The point is that your attitude is way too simple. An anti-lawyer 
backlash will hurt us where it hurts most; in effect when there is an 
issue we need our lawyers and when you think it healthy to consider them 
dirt, they will smile and increase the bill.

The notion of having a useful encyclopaedia is not one where it can only 
be freely used in the United States. That would be utterly stupid 
because it would negate our aims.

Thanks,
     GerardM