Someone will sue somewhere. Someone will win somewhere. Either Wikimedia will say "we are an American NPO - we exist under the American (self-lauditory, self-preserving, self-centered) protectionist system. Exactly how many nukes do *you have?" If that somewhere is the USA, and free speech, public good, and fair use are slapped down in the name of tyrannical property and human puppetry, then WP must go underground: Imagine a decentralized peer-to-peer network that exchanges article edits, run on light clients on any number of systems around the world... Anyway, thats for later.
For now, the good that the project provides outweighs almost any claim of "damages," and like Ray said, (typed rather) judgements are made on a case by case basis and are unsually limited to profits. Who poses a danger? What philosophical grounds are they standing on? What claim to property do they have that trancends fair use? What would be the harm in a lost verdict? Win-win all around, IMHO.
ReLaX.
S
--- mbecker mbecker@jumpingjackweb.com wrote:
Again, I've been gone for quite a while. Has there been a consensus by the community that we should start using copyrighted material in wikipedia? Even if this is fair use, what's stopping the copyright holders from suing the wikimedia foundation, and incurring a great deal of legal fees?
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail