On 3/12/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
On Sun, 12 Mar 2006 07:06:20 -0500, you wrote:
Any corporate entity can close down overnight if the money dries up. Lawsuits are a great way to get rid of large amounts of money very fast - actually I wonder if organised crime has ever thought of that? Set up a law office as a shell company and just watch the money chugging down the drain :-) But seriously...
C'mon now, even Enron didn't close "overnight", and I would think the Wikimedia foundation has much more accurate books than they do. If the foundation ran out of money, it would be clear a long time beforehand. And even if they did run out of money, there are lots of servers that could be sold and/or used as collateral for loans to pay for the bandwidth while the encyclopedia gets copied to others and the "no, we're really broke, send us money or we disappear" message goes out).
You're rather missing the point, I think. There are circumstances under which the foundation could be shut down, and lawyers do exist, so precautionary temporary blanking or deletion of disputed content is not unreasonable.
My point was that such a shutdown wouldn't happen overnight (unless maybe you pissed off the executive branch of the government enough).
If the foundation is facing a legitimate legal threat, then sure, it needs to comply. Jimmy seemed to suggest that wasn't always the case, in fact he said that most of the content was not libelous.
And finally, I don't have any problem with blanking disputed content. Anyone has the power and in many cases the responsibility to do that.
The total resources devoted to ass-covering are negligible as a proportion of the total costs, and the proportion of articles affected is also negligible.
I think the whole thing is being blown out of all proportion. Guy (JzG)