[Foundation-l] Board meeting in Rotterdam later this week
David Strauss
david at fourkitchens.com
Fri Jan 19 20:44:35 UTC 2007
Wikipedia's unique structure combined with certain favorable provisions
in the DMCA seem to make Wikipedia much more legally sane than many* Web
projects.
*e.g. MySpace, Google's book scanning project, YouTube, LiveJournal
Delirium wrote:
> 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
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