Delirium wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
The biggest error that I see is that people with
not enough knowledge
about the law make the policy.
Yes.
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.
Reckless or not, it has not led to any law suits against the Foundation
itself. There may have been any number of threats of lawsuits, but so
far the only lawsuit was in Germany and was won. Risks are often a
major factor in implementing anything really new.
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.
That depends a lot on where you put the limits of "useful and
necessary". I think that the latitude is much wider than what we have used.
Ec