The Bridgeman case was a British publisher; it is important to remember the national treatment principle in international copyright law. The regarguement in Bridgeman surrounded around the question of applying British law to infringement under US law. It was put aside because the British case on which Bridgeman relied was no longer good law in the UK (it was an 1865 that said a photograph that was just a copy of something else was copyrightable because at that time it was not just "slavish copying" as it is now considered.
Is such an issue of applying another countries law in the US a possibility for Wikipedia? Yes. Will someone bring an infringement suit? I doubt it because Wikipedia has a very strong fair use AND fair dealing defense (depending on the country). Regarding privacy rights Wikipedia's NPOV approach will also make any lawsuit that might deal with such privacy invasions a nonsuit, after all if someone does not like what they read on Wikipedia they can change it and make it more accurate. It is probably the problem of the person posting the information rather than the Wikipedia collective; there is a strong argument that Wikipedia cannot police its own content and thus cannot be responsible for copyright violations, libel or any other tort that might be committed by its volunteers; the volunteer attempts at policing are laudable, but in and of themselves doing so does not appear to create any kind of obligation to do so; after all Wikipedia does not have any resources to apply to such due dilligence.
Anyway, the publicity from any infringement/privacy suit will be good for Wikipedia, no?
Of course Wikipedia 1.0 will have to have much higher standards as it will be a fixed product.
Alex756
From: "Jimmy Wales" jwales@bomis.com
Daniel Mayer wrote:
But what is legal to have on the Wikimedia server is a separate issue and only the laws of the United States and California apply to that.
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.