Aphaia wrote: What EXACTLY does the law in these countries say? Are there any references to how the courts in these countries have interpreted such laws? Someone said that books of famous quotations are sold in Germany. How could that be in a country with such a strict law about quotations? Laws may very well restrict our activities, but there should be no obligation to interpret them in the most restrictive way. When a particular law gives a ridiculous result, that is the time to see if there are legal arguments available for interpretations that are more favorable. Ec

Not just that. May I remind people that German is not just spoken in Germany. Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland come to mind. So if it is not allowed under German law, but is under their law we could always make a writ that the de.wikiquote is meant for country xxx . Walter/Waerth

Walter van Kalken wrote: I'm learning German, and I live in the US. The issue of which laws of which jurisdictions we need to worry about, and to what degree, is a very complex one with no simple formulaic answers. For example, I think it is a good thing that the German wikipedia is quite strict against fair use, because most re-users of that work will be trying to distribute it in Germany, and relying on the more liberal provisions of fair use/fair dealing that en.wikipedia relies on would be unwise. On the other hand, if something about German law made it impossible to have a legal redistribution of Wikipedia in German *no matter what* then we'd just have to ignore the law and build Wikipedia anyway, knowing that redistribution within Germany will be problematic. In the case of Wikiquote, I need to study the issue more carefully, but I generally agree that the mere fact that redistributing the work (or hosting it on servers in Germany) is problematic is no reason for us to shut it down. It's perfectly legal where it is. At the same time, I think what we need to do is think really hard about how to do what we want to do, within the confines of the law. For example, it has been said that we can't quote "without context" -- ok, let's get a sense of what that means in reality. What legal arguments do German versions of Bartlett's rely on? What kind of context need we supply? Maybe the solution is that de.wikiquote has to be a lot more strict about detailed attribution and contextualization of quotes -- fine. --Jimbo

Delirium wrote: These things are judgment calls which I think have to be made carefully, and there will be no simple formulaic answer. Because of the _way_ that we make decisions (i.e. with a fair amount of autonnomy for different languages, and with efforts to find consensus rather than hard-and-fast rules of voting or whatever), we will sometimes find ourselves being inconsistent in some minor ways. As a matter of fact, I *do* make the same argument for removing fair-use from en as well. I think we should avoid fair-use images much much more strongly than we do now. At the same time, I think that fair use is a *good thing* in general, because it is an acknowledgement that there are limitations on the rights of copyright holders, and we should use it when we really do need it. --Jimbo

Walter van Kalken wrote: Brion on IRC: brion <irc://irc.freenode.net/brion,isnick>well, it might be because people hate *you* specifically. or it might be because ongoing anti-spam efforts are being experimented with, because this issue is much bigger than you personally. I demand this experiment be stopped now Waerth

Walter van Kalken wrote: Walter's ISP runs an open web proxy; this means that everybody in the world can use it as a shield for attacking various web sites (including us). We're working on making the spam-blocking and vandalism-blocking less painful, though whapping this lame-brained ISP with a big cluestick would help too. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia%3ALe_Bistro#Utilisateur:Montaia… A french editor, Montaia, would also like to be unblocked. Thanks for anyone who could help her. I told her to register to wikitech-l. ant seems solved. I wonder a couple of things though .......

Andre Engels wrote: Almost all of our bot-driven vandalism and spam comes from open proxies. And the same open proxies are often used for email, IRC and IM spam. The SORBS list only contains proxies which have been used for email spam, so next time you see a complaint, think of all the spam you may have received from that person. I'd rather encourage the people who run these servers to secure them, and only unblock them as a last resort. It's in Wikipedia's interests, as well as the interests of the general Internet community. -- Tim Starling

Tim Starling (t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au) [050330 23:43]: Has anyone had a chance to look at bug 550? It's specifically so that this sort of block will only hit anon users. - d.

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 01:23:56 +1000, Tim Starling &lt;t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au&gt; wrote: Tim please don't. We already had a bot page move attacked on sq: (from [[w:sq:User:Biskota]]). I happened to be online at the time (only two admins on sq, about 5 regular users), and still it took me and another contributor a good 20 minutes to clean up all the page moves. If I hadn't been online the only good way to fix it would have been a db restore. We were also lucky that it wasn't using a proxy, but it's the next logical step for an attacker. Page move and edit throttling for newbie users would also be tremendously useful (maybe it can be put in 1.5 since the schema is changing).

Waerth, what is the name and contact email of your ISP? There are quite a few ppl on this list, and it certainly wouldnt hurt for your ISP to recieve a bunch of emails complaining about thier open proxy. Sure maybe it will do nothing, but then again, maybe it might just yeild good results. Maybe an officialish letter from the foundation could also be sent. And anyway, telling ppl that they are on the SORBS list and urging them to clean up thier act, has to be better than just blocking them. Also, would it be possible to ban all users (logged-in included) on the SORBS list, then make a white list which any admin would be able to edit? (And obviously put a note on the "You are blocked cause you are on the SORBS list page" of how to apply to get onto the whitelist.) ~~~~ On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:55:48 +0700, Walter van Kalken &lt;walter(a)vankalken.net&gt; wrote: -- hit me: robin.shannon.id.au jab me: saudade(a)jabber.zim.net.au This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/

In today's paper their was an article about True internet. The daughter of asianet handling ADSL connections. Asianet itself handles dialup. Some exerpts from it: "True's ADSL broadband Internet service has about 20,000 corporate users and more than 200,000 individual users, representing around 80 per cent of Thailand's broadband Internet market." So wikipedia is currently blocking 80 percent of all Thai broadband users. "Earlier this month, True said its total number of broadband subscribers would reach 500,000 this year, and revenue from its broadband Internet service would double to almost Bt3 billion." So we would be blocking half a million Thais by the end of the year!! And that is just Broadband. Their Dialup members are a multiple of this!!! For the article see: http://www.komchadluek.net/breaking/read.php?lang=en&newsid=52375 Walter