There is truth in both of your comments, but it's not quite so simple. This is why I think counsel is vital, so the legal footing can be shored up.
Stratton Oakmont vs. Prodigy (1995) established that on a bulletin board system, editorial control equals editorial responsibility. The Telecom Act of 1996 effectively reversed it through legislation, as did Zeran vs. AOL (1996) where the US Court of Appeals reinforced that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as a publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the case. A good primer on this all can be found at: http://www.ssbb.com/standard.html
Wikimedia can reasonbly argue that it is simply a hive, and the individual users are the ones creating and editing content, then it would be off the hook. A nice consequence of being hosted in the United States. This would seem consistent with Erik's argument. Regardless, though, Fred is also right, in that we would have to have a significant legal representation on retainer even to rebuff the first charge by plaintiffs and to tell them to go after the individual writer/reporter. How is that for a NPOV answer? :)
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 08:14:09 -0600, Fred Bauder fredbaud@ctelco.net wrote:
Anyone with a damages decree is going to levy on the servers and the domain names.
Fred
From: erik_moeller@gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
Pure FUD. The ownership of the content is with its authors, not with the Wikimedia Foundation.