[Foundation-l] Fair use being badly abused on en.wikipedia

Nathan nawrich at gmail.com
Mon Jan 7 21:12:36 UTC 2008


I'm less concerned with the Foundation being sued (because we are
protected in most cases, both by our ability to respond to takedown
notices and our educational purpose) and more concerned by the
vulnerability of content reusers to suit. Our policy on free content
is not to protect *us* - if that were the case, we could just request
permission to use whole troves of content and be done. The policy
protects those who, through our license, reuse our content for their
own purposes. They are potentially much more liable to suit and this
liability for them violates our goal to assemble a completely reusable
base of knowledge.

The best way to protect those who wish to utilize our content under
its license is to ensure that we adhere to it - or change it. The best
way to ensure our compliance is by guarding the insertion of non-free
content - not laboriously deleting it once its eventually noticed.

Nathan



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