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

[Ray Saintonge]

Delirium wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>  
>
>>Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>The biggest error that I see is that people with not enough knowledge 
>>>about the law make the policy.   
>>>      
>>>
>>Yes.  
>>    
>>
>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.
>
Reckless or not, it has not led to any law suits against the Foundation 
itself.  There may have been any number of threats of lawsuits, but so 
far the only lawsuit was in Germany and was won.  Risks are often a 
major factor in implementing anything really new.

>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.
>
That depends a lot on where you put the limits of "useful and 
necessary".  I think that the latitude is much wider than what we have used.

Ec