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.
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"?
At the root of things, "to publish" is "to make things public".
There
is nothing in the concept to imply that the person doing so is in the
business of producing books, magazines, web pages or anything of the
sort. At one time publication could have been by the medium of a town
crier.
I don't think that the mere proofreader can be considered a publisher.
He does not produce any new information that he makes public.
A key factor in distinguishing between a publisher and an ISP seems to
be editorial control, and oonsciously active participation in the
editing process. An ISP who is told that there is something illegal
about a page can easily remove it as a result of being so told. Being
pro-active in this may be more characteristic of a publisher, because it
involves making our own legal decisions about whether a writing is in
some fashion illegal.
Ec