Jimmy Wales wrote:
One caveat that I would like to introduce here is that we do want Wikipedia to be easily redistributable in the majority of countries around the world. Therefore _some_ concession to non-U.S. law is warranted in _some_ cases.
But really, this sort of discussion is generally just fun abstraction, since I'm not sure that there are really that many cases in which the copyright or censorship laws of the countries we're most interested in actually restrict us much.
I doubt very much whether anyone will be able to legally sell Wikipedia 1.0 on a streetcorner in North Korea, nor do I think we can seriously entertain the sort of self-censorship that would be required in order to make that happen.
This is sort of a tangential issue, but it seems copyright issues might indeed pose a major problem for a Wikipedia 1.0. It's quite possible that we have not caught all the copyright-violating articles submitted to Wikipedia (though we do catch a lot of them), and it's further quite possible that the copyright holders who haven't yet noticed will notice once a higher-profile Wikipedia 1.0 is released. At this time they may inform us of the copyright violation, and ask us to remove the offending material. Doing so from the website is trivial, but it would also force us to stop distributing Wikipedia 1.0 until a modified version without the copyright violation has been prepared. This could be disastrous for attempts to produce a paper or CD-ROM version, as any inventory copies have to be destroyed and a new print run prepared. If we got, say, three copyright violation notices spaced a month or so apart, it would effectively make it impossible to distribute Wikipedia in such a form, since the costs of starting a new print run each time would become prohibitive. And it's not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that we might receive more in the neighorhood of a dozen such notices.
-Mark