Fred-
Yeh, you folks are just not listening. You need to check into what even a simple nuisance action against you would cost. God forbid, what the consequences would be if there was a substantial award against you.
The Wikimedia Foundation is not some fragile baby that cannot handle the real world. If that was so, we should not operate Wikipedia itself, because it faces many of the very same risks. Occasional legal harassment is something we will have to deal with one way or another and hardly a good excuse not to start a potentially world changing project. In fact, it is the very protection of the Wikimedia Foundation and the international respect that it can command (and which can be turned into donations) which makes a project like Wikinews feasible.
Just take the example of Indymedia's confiscated equipment. One reason that they weren't able to get much support (not that they tried) is that people tend to perceive Indymedia as a fanatic propaganda outfit. Wikinews, on the other hand, will be seen as a community effort with the goal to neutrally report on events. If we need to defend against any kind of harassment, the entire net media and well-funded organizations like the EFF will be behind us.
In the event of an author abusing their privileges and reporting incorrectly, we will do what any magazine or newspaper will do: We will apologize, post a correction, and make sure this person won't report for us again. Anything beyond that has to be decided on a case by case basis.
At a bare minimum, in order that all the work we have done doesn't end up in the ownership of a plaintiff
Pure FUD. The ownership of the content is with its authors, not with the Wikimedia Foundation.
Regards,
Erik