2007/1/16, teun spaans teun.spaans@gmail.com:
It is absolutely correct that he still would be liable. In theory as well as in practice. In practice the chance would also be greater that the department of justice would decide to let the matter rest, as fairly unimportant, and not worth the trouble. We shouldnt count on it, but we can keep in mind that Italians in Italy, probably the bulk of editors of the Italian wiki, should obey Italian law.
I don't think liability of authors should be the only reason to do these things for. There's also the principle of copyleft. If we put material under GFDL that would violate other people's copyrights when published under certain non-exceptional circumstances (outside the US or for profit, to name two that are important for this thread, we may be following the letter of the GFDL in doing so, but definitely not the spirit of copyleft.