[Foundation-l] Re: Formal request: Wikinews project

[Andrew Lih]

There is truth in both of your comments, but it's not quite so simple.
This is why I think counsel is vital, so the legal footing can be
shored up.

Stratton Oakmont vs. Prodigy (1995) established that on a bulletin
board system, editorial control equals editorial responsibility. The
Telecom Act of 1996 effectively reversed it through legislation, as
did Zeran vs. AOL (1996) where the US Court of Appeals reinforced that
"no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be
treated as a publisher or speaker of any information provided by
another information content provider." The Supreme Court declined to
hear an appeal of the case. A good primer on this all can be found at:
http://www.ssbb.com/standard.html

Wikimedia can reasonbly argue that it is simply a hive, and the
individual users are the ones creating and editing content, then it
would be off the hook. A nice consequence of being hosted in the
United States. This would seem consistent with Erik's argument.
Regardless, though, Fred is also right, in that we would have to have
a significant legal representation on retainer even to rebuff the
first charge by plaintiffs and to tell them to go after the individual
writer/reporter. How is that for a NPOV answer? :)

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Tue, 12 Oct 2004 08:14:09 -0600, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> Anyone with a damages decree is going to levy on the servers and the domain
> names.
> 
> Fred
> 
> > From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
> 
> > Pure FUD. The ownership of the content is with its authors, not with the
> > Wikimedia Foundation.