On 21/05/2008, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
2008/5/21 Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com:
We'll be able to see why when the court throws out the allegations against WMF? I fail to see what about the Wikinews article would make that less likely to happen,
In a civil action, being seen to play nice is very important indeed and gets you lots of points. The courts are perpetually clogged, the charges to a litigant for bringing a case are well below what it actually costs the taxpayer, and people are very much expected to do everything they can to resolve problems before it gets that far. Mostly this works. (WMF and its projects have policies of playing nice as far as is reasonably possible, not just for this reason but because it's important to our reputation and people are scared by how powerful we are already.)
Other news organizations (in the U.S. at least) usually take the opposite approach, and refuse to take any action at all in response to frivolous complaints, lest that simply encourage more frivolous complaints. Certainly the New York Times wouldn't retract a story or remove it from their website, if they thought there was no legal problem with it, simply to "play nice".
You don't need to be so nice when you have several thousand lawyers.