[Foundation-l] Board meeting in Rotterdam later this week

[David Strauss]

Wikipedia's unique structure combined with certain favorable provisions
in the DMCA seem to make Wikipedia much more legally sane than many* Web
projects.

*e.g. MySpace, Google's book scanning project, YouTube, LiveJournal

Delirium wrote:
> While true, it's worth recalling the reason for the general anti-lawyer 
> backlash among communities of this sort: That in normal 
> corporate/foundation/business practice, when left to the legal 
> department things almost never get approved because of the legal risk.  
> Wikipedia as a project would never have been approved at all by any 
> reasonable corporation's legal department, because the legal issues are 
> far too risky to countenance.  We recklessly went ahead and started 
> building it anyway, and figured we'd tackle the legal issues as they arose.
> 
> That doesn't mean we shouldn't defer to lawyers where useful and 
> necessary, but the general "ecology" is one of tension between legal 
> caution on the one hand and a desire to produce a useful encyclopedia on 
> the other hand.
> 
> -Mark

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