Delirium schreef:
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.
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
Hoi, It is very nice to look at it from the perspective of a single legal practice ie the American one. When you look how things are, you have to acknowledge that the German chapter was taken to court and not the Foundation. Luckily the German chapter behaved in a proper way and did well. The point is that your attitude is way too simple. An anti-lawyer backlash will hurt us where it hurts most; in effect when there is an issue we need our lawyers and when you think it healthy to consider them dirt, they will smile and increase the bill.
The notion of having a useful encyclopaedia is not one where it can only be freely used in the United States. That would be utterly stupid because it would negate our aims.
Thanks, GerardM