Angela:
The legal risk lies with the user who uploaded it
and claimed it was
fair use, not with the Foundation.
That may be the letter of the law interpretation, but for "the foundation" to make a policy of deflecting all such responsibility to its contributors, would only bode well for any competing project that chose to show a little more philosophical and legal backbone. Pioneering projects need to be pioneering, not capitulating or betraying to their own supporters, especially if the mistakes are honest ones in the realm of intel property. In any case, the inclusion of material is a community decision, and so the foundation as a facilitator for the violation, (by an implied community decision) is legally responsible. Does going apenuts with compliance paranoia to a particular legal system comply with the larger goals of being globally accessible and philosophically equitable? I.D.T.S...
What exactly constitutes a "community 'decision'" when anything can be changed anytime, is wobbly.
S
--- Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Angela_ wrote:
Even if this is fair use, what's stopping the
copyright holders from suing the wikimedia foundation, and incurring a great deal of legal fees?
The legal risk lies with the user who uploaded it
and claimed it was
fair use, not with the Foundation.
That's interesting. This is the first time I hear this (but I haven't followed the discussion very much, either). So what are you going to do if the uploader is an anonymous IP address?
Is the foundation willing to pursue lawsuits
against them for violating copyright law?
If an image really is fair use, it is not
violating copyright law.
At least not in the U.S.
The German Wikipedia have a policy which disallows
fair use completely.
Which is reasonable, seeing as most of the users of the German-language content are going to be German, Swiss, Austrian or possibly Luxembourgian, and those countries don't have a "fair use" law.
We are protected to some extent by the [[Online
Copyright Infringement
Liability Limitation Act]]. We would take the
images down if someone
sent a valid takedown notice, so presumably we
would avoid legal risk
that way.
Again, this is interesting. I didn't know there was an extra Act for this. This begs the question would other countries have a similar law.
Timwi
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