Fred Bauder wrote:

Being judgement proof is not an option, what will happen is that they will seize the servers and domain names and hold them hostage til we raise the money to pay.

What I'm trying to illustrate is that in a civil action for damages, by the time a substantial judgment is issued, Wikimedia as a legal entity would be effectively dead anyway. Thanks to the copyleft licensing, the content would already have moved to the fork that would undoubtedly start, and many of the contributors would follow. There wouldn't be much of anyone left to demand the ransom from, and in any case after a judgment you can seize assets but you can't generally require people to raise new funds. And given the choice, who will the public at large donate money to: the fork that is carrying on Wikimedia's work, or the original Wikimedia that has to turn over anything it receives to the plaintiff?

The actual seizure and "hostage-holding" hypothesized here would come at the very end of the litigation process. It would be like picking up the pieces of a corpse, while the phoenix springs up again in another location. A painful experience to be sure, and one to be avoided if possible. But given that this result probably does not benefit either the plaintiff or the plaintiff's lawyer, it would take quite a combination of incompetence, malice, and irrationality, both on our part and theirs, to bring this nightmare scenario to pass. Publish a retraction if it turns out the plaintiff is right, and let them know that pursuing damages will not be lucrative.

I think seizure of property in the context of a criminal investigation would be a bigger concern, since this can happen prior to judgment and with little or no warning. In other words, the Indymedia situation. For that problem, the answer has less to do with financial resources and corporation shell games, and lies more with careful fact-checking and pre-publication review.

--Michael Snow