[Foundation-l] The EFF appears to be somewhat upset by the foundation

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/4/23 Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com>:
> If they had transferred the domain name over to us, we'd have paid all their
> expenses and forwarded requests for some period of time to any new domain
> name they chose to register. There are other alternatives we might have
> considered as well. But, take my word for it, we had no interest at all in
> shutting down their site (which, so far as I can tell, is a very low-traffic
> site in any case).

I don't doubt that you weren't trying to shut them down, but it was
highly predictable that people would come to that conclusion.

> At any rate, disagreements resolved through negotiations typically lead to
> compromises, and so it makes sense sometimes to make your strongest
> arguments first, so that you can fall back into a reasonable compromise.

Very true. You have to balance starting high enough that you have room
to come down with not appearing unreasonable. It's a difficult
balancing act, and I'm not sure you got it quite right this time.
Perhaps you could have requested they make wikipediaart.org into a
portal page, linking to their site and to Wikipedia, but keep it under
their control - basically a really big disclaimer. Then you could have
settled for a nice small disclaimer like the one they've gone with.