On 03/05/07, Andrew Lau netsnipe@gmail.com wrote:
Now that the desperately needed legal advice is apparently not forthcoming, it may eventually appear to outsiders that we are paranoid of what the AACS/MPAA may do to us instead of only being cautious. I am starting to feel uncomfortable that many administrators such as myself may be acting unilaterally over the matter based upon our own personal (mis)interpretations of the DMCA instead of enforcing an official stance or community consensus. So how exactly should we respond to the press regarding this?
As I said on the blog:
A flashmob of fight-the-power morons are still spamming an allegedly illegal number into every input box on the web. The Wikipedia admins collectively declared "FUCK OFF YOU SPAMMERS." (Some have gone rabid "ZOMG LAWSUIT" and we were getting a pile of oversight requests as well ― I didn't zap, Fred did, until Erik told us not to. Mind you, it nicely short-circuited the idiotic deletion review.) Eventually it was put into the spam filter, because distributed spam is spam.
We're a project to write an encyclopedia, not a public graffiti wall. You want to paint "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0″ in fifty-foot high letters on every Hollywood studio, I'll buy brushes. You want to splatter it across Wikipedia, you can fuck off. I expect the article will contain the number in due course; I'd guess two to four weeks, any earlier would in my opinion only encourage further use of Wikipedia as a graffiti wall.
(The number is still in the spam filter, I've asked if there's any way to tell when it'll be safe to take it out.)
- d.