On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 14:51:05 +0100, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Just FYI :-)
Vielen Dank fuer deine Informationen, Magnus.
The German Verein has just received a legal opinion they ordered some time ago, concerning various legal issues for wikipedia and German law.
It turns out that, according to the legal opinion, German law prohibits the collection of quotes, or quotes as such, if they are not used in a context.
Japanese Wikiquote has a similar restriction. We have no legal consultant but there have been a similar sentence and it made us decide to have a very strict policy toward submissions.
According to the Japanese law, any quotation should be under two restriction. 1) Any quotation should be used in a context 2) quotation should be subsidiary from the view of quantities, that is, the amount of quotation should be less than the text which gives the context.
That would mean the German wikiquote project's legal status is shaky at best. (IANAL)
We accept only submission from PD texts. So there are no quote from TV and movies, nor contemporary writers. Some politicians have their pages because their words and addresses in some occasion (at the diet, e.g.) are PD. We should have given up some pages like "Albert Einstein" .
It is a bit shabby but still now we have a bunch of good classics. I hope it could be your consolation.