On 8/31/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com> wrote: One should not because it can matter. Say you made an illegal death threat against someone in your city, but you did it by posting it to a web site hosted in some country where that's not illegal. Which law would apply to you? If you do something illegal in your city/country the law applies to you there in addition to any laws from the country which hosts the web site if it has agreements with your country. Same thing with copyright, the editors need to abide by their laws, or there may consequences in their country, and they need to abide by the laws in Florida, USA or there may be consequeces for at least the Foundation, if not the editor. Dori

Kelly Martin wrote: In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. At the Swedish (language) Wikipedia village pump, if people decide to meet up to discuss stories where they have received complaints for copyright violations, they are likely to meet in Stockholm and the complaints (if any) are likely to have originated from media companies in the same town. Both the media companies and the wikipedians are subject to the laws of Sweden (with very few exceptions), and if a conflict should escalate they will meet in a court of law in Sweden. It doesn't really matter if they use a computer made in Taiwan or a server hosted in Florida. Courts sentence people, not servers. Now, because the entire Wikipedia community is so prudent, this whole scenario is very unlikely. Copyright violations of this kind are settled by removing the contents, and it is rare that any rights holder would go to court to win damages. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

Why would writing text in German imply that it's written for a German audience and make the German courts able to judge you? It's not as if there aren't other German-speaking countries... -- Ausir Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia http://pl.wikipedia.org