[WikiEN-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

[David Goodman]

There's a fifth reason: our employment of fair use material depends to
a certain extent on our non-profit status: of the 4 factors
determining the permissibility of fair use in US copyright, one of
them is the profit/non-profit status of the use.

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 9:09 PM, Geoffrey Plourde <geo.plrd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I can think of several reasons why the Foundation remains a non profit. If we switched to a Corporation, this would;
>
>  1) Remove tax deductible status (Think taxation, big time)
>  2) Undermine crediblity as a free compendium of knowledge
>  3) Create a big legal mess. WF would have to define stockholders which would disenfranchise several million users. In addition, these new stockholders would have a tax mess on their hands.
>  4) Open us up to SEC scrutiny
>
>
>
>  ----- Original Message ----
>  From: Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com>
>  To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>
> Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 5:48:50 PM
>  Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia
>
>
>
> On 11/03/2008, Geoffrey Plourde <geo.plrd at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  > Ads detract from the objectivity. Also, it could lead to a pain with the IRS.
>
>  If you don't read the ad (we're talking about google-style ads here, I
>  imagine) it cannot have any effect on objectivity.
>
>  I don't know about the tax situation, but there's no reason in
>  principle why Wikimedia (or a successor organisation) should remain
>  subject to not-for-profit rules.  Google is a corporation but the IRS
>  doesn't seem to have killed it yet.  Transition to commercial status
>  might be a bit weird, but it's doable because the content is all under
>  the GFDL.
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG