Thomas Dalton writes:

Ok, it only takes one *rich person*. Point stands.

Most rich people got (or stay rich) rich by making smart decisions about how to invest their money. Investing in a copyright lawsuit with no obvious remedy is not exactly a smart investment decision. And rich people can afford lawyers who will tell them just this.

It's a guess, it doesn't really have much of a basis, just gut feeling. I would have called it an estimate otherwise.

Okay, I am grateful for your admission that you have no facts in support in this point.

The flaw in Pascal's Wager is that it incorrectly assumes zero cost, what's that got to do with anything?

That's actually not the flaw in Pascal's Wager, but why do you assume there's "zero cost" associated with *not* migrating Wikipedia content to a version of GFDL that makes it more useful?

Why would I care about the plaintiff's costs? There are plenty of people in this world with more money than sense.

Yes, and by all means we should let our decisionmaking be held hostage by those with more money than sense -- or at least now that's what I understand your argument to be.

Removal of content isn't impossible, it's just impossible without causing a great deal of harm to Wikipedia.

Effectively the same argument, in my view. "It's possible, but the consequences would be infinitely terrible!" Pascal's Wager again.

As for registering copyright, isn't that US law? We're not talking about the US here. Do France and Germany have similar requirements?

Well, we'd have a very interesting case if the copyright holder proceeded in France or Germany to judgment and then tried to enforce the judgment in a U.S. court. Multinational litigation is a great hobby for millionaires, I guess, but not for most people.

It costs the plaintiffs money. Something lots of people have and the WMF doesn't.

I'll be on the lookout for millionaire Wikipedians who'd rather destroy WMF than allow relicensing under a new version of GFDL. I'm sure that's a very large class of individuals.

--Mike