Axel Boldt wrote:
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.
That's right, to an extent. But the Wikipedia non-profit does have a significant hand in directing the content. If I edit (which I rarely do), this is more obvious.
Under this good part of DMCA, if the nonprofit neglects to police the pages, and someone posts libel or similar, the nonprofit is not liable in any way, plus the nonprofit has a simple defense that gets the whole suit tossed out before it gets to a jury, so the cost of defense is low.
Without this defense, i.e. if someone argues that by setting standards, occassionally editing, posting here in the mailing list to set policy and mediate conflicts, that I (representative of the nonprofit) am "partly responsible for the content", then a case like that could end up before the jury.
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.
That would certainly be the argument that I'd make in court.
--Jimbo