[Foundation-l] german wikiquotes

[Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales]

Walter van Kalken wrote:
> >Laws may very well restrict our activities, but there should be no 
> >obligation to interpret them in the most restrictive way.  When a 
> >particular law gives a ridiculous result, that is the time to see if 
> >there are legal arguments available for interpretations that are more 
> >favorable.
> >
> Not just that. May I remind people that German is not just spoken in 
> Germany. Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland come to mind. So if it 
> is not allowed under German law, but is under their law we could always 
> make a writ that the de.wikiquote is meant for country xxx .

I'm learning German, and I live in the US.

The issue of which laws of which jurisdictions we need to worry about,
and to what degree, is a very complex one with no simple formulaic
answers.  For example, I think it is a good thing that the German
wikipedia is quite strict against fair use, because most re-users of
that work will be trying to distribute it in Germany, and relying on
the more liberal provisions of fair use/fair dealing that en.wikipedia
relies on would be unwise.

On the other hand, if something about German law made it impossible to
have a legal redistribution of Wikipedia in German *no matter what*
then we'd just have to ignore the law and build Wikipedia anyway,
knowing that redistribution within Germany will be problematic.

In the case of Wikiquote, I need to study the issue more carefully,
but I generally agree that the mere fact that redistributing the work
(or hosting it on servers in Germany) is problematic is no reason for
us to shut it down.  It's perfectly legal where it is.

At the same time, I think what we need to do is think really hard
about how to do what we want to do, within the confines of the law.
For example, it has been said that we can't quote "without context" --
ok, let's get a sense of what that means in reality.  What legal
arguments do German versions of Bartlett's rely on?  What kind of
context need we supply?

Maybe the solution is that de.wikiquote has to be a lot more strict
about detailed attribution and contextualization of quotes -- fine.

--Jimbo