Thanks you Villy.
As a reminder, Villy is a legal professional in France, with quite a reasonable number of
years of experience. He has already helped Wikimedia in several ways with his expertise,
such as in writting with JB Soufron the french local chapter bylaws; in writing
Stock.xchng legal analysis on wikicommons, in drafting the agreement between Mandrasoft
and Wikimedia (for CD production). He also helped privately on other legal issues, and is
naturally the foundator of the very near-birth french arbitration committee.
I think it is important that such departements as the legal one are created, for two
reasons. First of all, we need legal counselling not only on internal issues, but on
external as well.
We still have a long pending privacy policy to fix, and would not it be nice to finally
get a decent terms of use ? We need to proceed along the ways of licence... in particular
since now the creative commons are getting in the light, and with the beginning of
wikinews as well.
We hope more local chapters will be created, expect legal work on donations so as the
donators to get tax refunds etc... and as wikipedia is working, I hope we can rely on
internal abilities rather than paying a professional who know nothing of our way of
dealing with things.
Naturally, there are the agreements, such as hosting ones... also needing several eyes on
them.
There is, I think, a second reason why we need to slowly work out a more organised legal
resource... I expect one day we could get in real trouble with an organisation we
irritated. We also need to show those giving us money, that we are organised. It will make
us look more professional to simply show we are serious.
So, I hope that we slowly work out in this direction and learn to rely more on the
resources we have among us.
Ant
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Hello,
I've created :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal_department
and the category
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Legal
in order to centralize issues, people and skills related to legal questions.
Hopefully, this will getting useful.
villy ~~JC
Anthere
http://fr.wikipedia.org
http://anthere.shaihome.net/
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