[Foundation-l] [Announcement] French lawsuit against WMF won in court

[Sue Gardner]

Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> Yes, we've thought this through, thanks Peter.  In the event that this
>> became an issue, our position would be that the Foundation itself is not
>> paying for content; it is just facilitating a relationship between a
>> donor who wants to see a particular thing happen in the projects, and a
>> trusted volunteer who shares the same goal.
>>
>> It's hair-splitting maybe, but legalities generally are :-)
>>     
>
> That might well work. It does mean that the suggestions in another
> thread about getting round all the paperwork by simply buying the
> images, rather than hiring someone to produce them, would not be an
> option. Looks like the WMF is just going to have to fill out a load of
> forms...
>
>   
Probably, yes :-)

This is very much an experiment.  We think it's a pretty good one to 
trial-and-error with, because 1., Brianna Laugher, the volunteer, is 
highly trusted and effective; 2., Philip Greenspun, the donor, is 
sympathetic to our goals generally, and open to experimenting with us. 
He's also one person rather than an institution, which will make it 
fairly easy for us all to refine/finetune as we go. And 3., this is a 
large enough amount of money to make the project worthwhile on its own 
merits, but not so very large that we are locked in to something for a 
long period of time, if it turns out that it doesn't work very well.  
We're really grateful to Philip for being willing to try it out.

One goal here is simply to get more good illustrations into the projects 
- that's a worthy end result, obviously, in & of itself. But we're also 
aiming to see if the general idea -funneling restricted donations to 
community members for execution- is workable. To the extent that it does 
work, it could be very powerful.