On 1/13/06, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
User pages would, if I read the situation right, be very little different from a GeoCities website or the equivilent.
You definitely read it wrong. Wikipedia userpages are, in general, very different from the average geocities website.
How so? Neither are exempt from legal requirements to justify fair use.
Actually, neither are publishers anyway, they are ISPs, so they don't have to justify fair use to anyone - they just have to take the content down if they receive a DMCA takedown notice.
But the two are different because the purpose of Wikipedia userpages is to help build an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is not a webhosting project - Geocities is - in my opinion that makes the two extremely different.