[Foundation-l] GFDL Q&A update and question

[Delirium]

geni wrote:
> 2009/1/9 Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com>:
>> As a major organization with legal council, the WMF is in a much
>> better position to understand what the license requires than most
>> reusers.
> 
> The law however doesn't care how easy licenses are for reusers to
> understand. The WMF cannot provide legal advice and in that case
> finding out what authors view as acceptable may well be more
> worthwhile than legally meaningless advice.

It's not quite legally meaningless, in that legal decisions in practice 
aren't nearly as much like formal-logic inference as many people would 
like to pretend. In an ambiguous area of law with little precedent and a 
license that could be interpreted multiple ways, "I reused Wikipedia 
content in accordance with how Wikimedia said the license should be 
interpreted" would probably be granted some deference, if the Wikimedia 
interpretation were within the range of reasonable ones.

-Mark