Most importantly for all this, the SERVERS are not hosted in Finland
(unless something snuck in there behind my back).
Under US and EU laws, I would think there's no Finnish jurisdiction over
where the servers are located.
If the Finnish Police are asserting authority over any website written in
their language, there's a problem.
If they think they're hosted in Finland, then there's just a quick
educational explanation pointing to the WMF server locations documentation.
In any case, pass this to legal(a)wikimedia.org
On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 5:54 PM, Kevin Gorman <kgorman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I would dispute the suggestion the Finnish Wikipedia
is specific to
Finland; I read it regularly and have never been to Finland. There are at
a bare minimum something like 300,000 fluent Finnish speakers who don't
live in Finland (and I don't think that's counting the portion of Swedes
who speak Finnish,) so although the fundraising banner probably primarily
attracted donations from people in Finland, it likely attracted plenty of
donations from other countries as well.
Best,
Kevin Gorman
On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 5:38 PM, Charles Gregory <wmau.lists(a)chuq.net>
wrote:
In Australia, we (Wikimedia Australia) had to get
fundraising approval
before the 2010 fundraiser (when the chapters accepted and processed the
payments and then passed a share back to the Wikimedia Foundation). This
was made more complicated due to the fundraising laws being a state issue
rather than national and so we had to seek approval from each state, some
with different requirements than others (for example, some needed a
member
in that state willing to act as a contact
person).
When this arrangement ended and Wikimedia Foundation took on the
fundraising themselves, this was no longer a requirement due to the WMF
not
being an Australian organisation. (Although we
advised WMF to seek their
own legal advice to confirm this)
Your situation appears to be different for several reasons:
1) Your situation involves a group of users, not a chapter (the donation
is
to a non-Finnish organisation)
2) The donation information is in a language specific to your country -
and
so by targetting Finnish speakers, they were
targetting Finland
residents -
whereas the same language is spoken in Australia
and the United States.
With #1 - given the number of smaller websites with a "Donate via Paypal"
button in the corner, I don't think this should be an issue.
The only thing that would shift this in the Finnish police's favour is
#2 -
suggesting that Finns were involved in the
fundraising - and as others
have
said, this could quite easily be a person (or
people) who the Finnish
government has no jurisdiction over (a national of another country who
has
learned Finnish, for example). Unless the
Finnish Government has some
sort
of strange ownership or legal connection to the
Finnish language...
(Dislcaimer: IANAL of course)
(BTW - I was amused that even Google translate failed to translate Nemo's
link the first time around!)
Regards,
Charles Gregory
(User:Chuq)
On Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 8:33 AM, Leinonen Teemu <teemu.leinonen(a)aalto.fi
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just got a message that the Finnish Police have asked the
fi.wikipedia,
by
sending an email to the wikifi-admin(a)list.wikimedia.org, to give a
written statement about their possible violation of the laws that
regulate
> fundraising in Finland. There is a little news about this already
online
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2014/02/07/finnish_police_probe_w…
>
> I chat about this with a lawyer friend and he was afraid that the
police
msy go
after the volunteers that have participated in the fundraising,
e.g.
by translating the fundraising messages.
Is there any equivalent cases from other countries?
In Finland one needs a pre-given permission to do fundraising.
- Teemu
--------------------------------------------------
Teemu Leinonen
http://teemuleinonen.fi
+358 50 351 6796
Media Lab
http://mlab.uiah.fi
Aalto University
School of Arts, Design and Architecture
--------------------------------------------------
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