Wikipedia's unique structure combined with certain favorable provisions in the DMCA seem to make Wikipedia much more legally sane than many* Web projects.
*e.g. MySpace, Google's book scanning project, YouTube, LiveJournal
Delirium wrote:
While true, it's worth recalling the reason for the general anti-lawyer backlash among communities of this sort: That in normal corporate/foundation/business practice, when left to the legal department things almost never get approved because of the legal risk. Wikipedia as a project would never have been approved at all by any reasonable corporation's legal department, because the legal issues are far too risky to countenance. We recklessly went ahead and started building it anyway, and figured we'd tackle the legal issues as they arose.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't defer to lawyers where useful and necessary, but the general "ecology" is one of tension between legal caution on the one hand and a desire to produce a useful encyclopedia on the other hand.
-Mark