Erik Moeller wrote: Probably not, but an attorney would need to look at it. Jeff

Andrew Gray wrote: Unlike the servers, these are intangible assets. As such the physical seizure of the assets would be impossible. To say that all agreements would suddenly become void would be unworkable. One would presume, that these events would reflect situations where the chapters are still financially sound. The transfer of rights would have taken place long before there was any difficulty. The creditor would have no choice. Ec

On 4/19/07, Delphine Ménard <notafishz(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, there are two main difficulties: 1) In the event of a major wikidisaster, we would likely see in fact a multitude of do-gooders and charlatans try to be the "next Wikipedia". Hence it is good to have some clearly designated successor to avoid the community splitting in a very chaotic fashion. 2) Any new community will essentially have to rebuild the user account database from scratch. This will slow down initial growth very significantly. At the same time, if a designated successor organization already has a replicated database they can use, that would make things easier. As for the issue of brands, if these cannot be licensed in a safe way, one could still designate "successor names" that are wholly owned by a separate organization. We should also re-evaluate whether the current US organizational structure (all assets owned by a single org.) is safest. Again, these are all questions that cyberlaw experts should be consulted on. We are currently evaluating several candidates for the role of WMF Legal Coordinator, and the question of risk management certainly makes for a nice long term project. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

On 18/04/07, Mohamed Magdy <mohamed.m.k(a)gmail.com> wrote: You couldn't. The user database is something that should be freed if possible. Not the passwords to WMF - but the fact that it's what credits contributions to their creator. Proprietising this and using it as leverage in blessing a chosen successor fork in case of disaster strikes me as a bad thing - can people only prove they wrote something if they choose the right fork to work with? - d.

On 4/18/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Preserving the ability of the projects to move forward in the event the WMF stops hosting them is important, but is fundamentally a community issue, not a Foundation issue. The Foundation needs to deal with preserving its own ability to function and operate as a hosting service. I think the communities should demand that the Foundation place the domain names and trademarks into a perpetual trust, precisely to ensure that the WMF's failure as a going concern will not destroy those communities by the loss of access to their domain names. Losing the domain name is far worse than losing the user databases (we can move past that, everyone just creates a new user identity) or even the content databases (there are scads of redundant copies out there). The domain name is unique and irretrievable. Kelly

Erik Moeller wrote: Why only one chapter? Why not all of them? Ec