[Foundation-l] Fwd: [WL-News] Wikimedia Foundation in danger oflosing immunity under the Communications Decency Act

[David Gerard]

2008/5/21 Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com>:

>  We'll be able to see why when the court throws out the allegations
>  against WMF? I fail to see what about the Wikinews article would make
>  that less likely to happen,


In a civil action, being seen to play nice is very important indeed
and gets you lots of points. The courts are perpetually clogged, the
charges to a litigant for bringing a case are well below what it
actually costs the taxpayer, and people are very much expected to do
everything they can to resolve problems before it gets that far.
Mostly this works. (WMF and its projects have policies of playing nice
as far as is reasonably possible, not just for this reason but because
it's important to our reputation and people are scared by how powerful
we are already.)


> and I certainly don't see what about it
>  would endanger Section 230 protection. Indeed, such things (content
>  created by a site's users and uploaded to the site using its normal
>  mechanisms) are -exactly- what Section 230 protects service providers
>  against liability for. It's a garbage case, so one would hope that the
>  court would throw it out anyway.


One would hope they will :-)


- d.