Two issues here: what is legal to have on the server and what is legal in the user's nation - WikiEN-l

15 May 2003

Toby wrote:
...
  The "international" (that is, non-English)
Wikipedias
 are also subject only to US and (I think) California law.
 That's where they're located, after all.
 (Although suggestions have been made in the past
 to self-censor [[fr:]] and [[zh:]]
 in order to prevent the governments of France and the PRC
 from declaring it illegal to *view* them,
 which isn't exactly the same thing.) 
IANAL

Ahem. If it is illegal for user x to do a and b in the country they are 
contributing from, then that user should /not/ do that! 

General comments to all:

If it is illegal in your nation to do something that would otherwise be legal 
in California, then you are still taking a personal risk if you break your 
own nation's laws. The simple fact that the server is in California does not 
shield you from the laws of your own nation.

But what is legal for Wikipedia to have on its server in San Diego is really 
only a matter of California/United States law (as Toby points out).   

I don't think the first part of this point gets stressed often enough.

Of course, what is "appropriate" is a different matter and is largely dictated 
by consensus and standing policy (both Wikipedia wide and language specific). 

<devil's advocate>
It is here where an interesting question arises; should particular languages 
have /added/ restrictions across their own language version of Wikipedia that 
go beyond California/US law in order to make texts written in French, for 
example, legal to have on a server in France?

Wouldn't that make the texts more useful to French-speaking peoples (well, at 
least the French speakers in France)?
</devil's advocate>

I would argue that this is a dangerous idea because then the laws of 
potentially every nation on earth could have veto power over what we have on 
Wikipedia just to make it theoretically possible to have our text usable as 
is and hosted on a server in each of those nations. The result of that would 
be massive censorship in order to meet the lowest common denominator.

IMO, we should keep things simple and only concern ourselves with these two 
things (as far as the legal issue goes):

1) What is legal for any one user to do in the nation they are submitting 
from.
2) What is legal to have on our server in California (this applies to 
everything we all submit; all text/media must be legal under California/US 
law). 

Both of the above factors limit what we each can individually submit. So for 
example; a user writing from Germany has to respect restrictions set forth by 
German law and US law in what they submit while a user writing from Australia 
has to do the same in respect to Australian and US law. 

Hm. This concept should be on a general disclaimer or something....

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)