On Jul 4, 2006, at 10:44 AM, Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:
Under US Law, Wikimedia is the "publisher" because they create "collections" of works of the Wikipedia site and "publish" them to the world as XML dumps. Whether electronic or in book form, they are publishing. This being said, given the nebulous and undefined state of internet IP law, whether they are a publisher or not, there's no legal precedence to determine liability, so at present they are operating in an area of experimental law on the frontiers of human knowledge.
Jeff
Not exactly and now that you are a "publisher" too, let us discuss the problem. Someone comes on your wiki and enters the information, "John Doe murdered his wife, Jane". You don't notice it and after 6 months or so John Doe files a libel action. You might want to claim that the anonymous ip who entered that information was the publisher, not you. There is a variant where that edit was contained in an XML dump that you did not notice. Meanwhile Wikipedia has deleted it completely, even from the history of the article. This is all pretty theoretical until there is significant distribution of a serious libel, but I throw it out to think about. Now suppose you did notice the information and rather than deleting it you just corrected the grammar and spelling. Are you the publisher now? And who is "you"?
Fred