--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
[about http://news.com.com/2009-1023-991264.html]
If it did stand, all the way to the Supreme Court, it could very negatively affect everything that we're doing. It would make the Wikipedia non-profit vulnerable to a lawsuit based on the actions of a user, which would mean -- in practice -- that we'd have to police things a lot more centrally, etc. It'd be crushing to our whole development model.
I don't think it affects us: the reasoning of the court was that Matchmaker.com is partly responsible for the content because they partly created it, by providing the user with a long series of yes/no questions and targeted essay questions to produce the ad. But the Wikipedia non-profit doesn't do anything like that. Any harmful content posted on Wikipedia was created completely independently by the (ab)user. All the prodding they got from us was a textbox and a blinking cursor.
Axel
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