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

[Thomas Dalton]

On 21/05/2008, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>  > 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.)
>
>
> Other news organizations (in the U.S. at least) usually take the
>  opposite approach, and refuse to take any action at all in response to
>  frivolous complaints, lest that simply encourage more frivolous
>  complaints. Certainly the New York Times wouldn't retract a story or
>  remove it from their website, if they thought there was no legal problem
>  with it, simply to "play nice".

You don't need to be so nice when you have several thousand lawyers.