Nathan Russell wrote:
Jimbo, to what extent do we need to respect the policies of other nations, and which other nations? No offense is meant to the many UK folks on this list, but I would not want wikipedia to have to remove all content that the Chinese or Saudi government objected to.
First, it's important to differentiate between content-neutral restrictions and content-based restrictions. There may be some overlap, but I think in the vast majority of cases, the restrictions we face will be largely one or the other.
Content-based restrictions we must ignore whenever they conflict with our NPOV mission. If a government objects to our work on political grounds, that's tough for them. We are very strongly protected by the United States government in this matter.
Some Content-based restrictions we may end up obeying, not out of respect for laws which violate the freedom of expression, but as a consequence of our NPOV mission. Both France and Germany have laws restricting the freedom of speech in various ways, but we are (in my opinion) unlikely to run afoul of those anyway, because we are an encyclopedia with an NPOV policy.
For example, a British newspaper distributed in France was fined for calling Jacques Chirac a worm. That's an inexcusable violation of human rights on the part of the French government, but it doesn't seem likely to cause us any trouble since we srupulously avoid making ALL controversial claims. We would, of course, report on the flap, in a neutral manner, but French law is not (to my knowledge) an obstacle to that.
Similarly, Germany has laws against some forms of expression relating to Naziism, but again, to my knowledge, so long as we stick to our NPOV mission, we aren't going to come close to violating those laws. (And, again, if we do, then we must ignore German law.)
For content-neutral restrictions, for example extremely narrow fair use provisions, we will have to make some judgment calls, and we may have to be creative. We want to preserve maximal freedom for downstream users, while at the same time not hampering our NPOV and encyclopedic mission. For the most part, we can obey such restrictions without compromising our mission, since the restrictions are content-neutral.
Is that explanation and distinction helpful?
I think it's a mistake to think that British limitations on fair use that may be slightly (or greatly) more restrictive that U.S. law are in anything like the same category as speech restrictions in North Korea or China or Iran or Saudi Arabia, etc..
They aren't even in the same category as speech restrictions in Germany and France.
--Jimbo