[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Please HELP save Wikipedia history ! (urgent)

[Ray Saintonge]

Tomasz Ganicz wrote:
> 2010/2/20 Ray Saintonge:
>   
>> Probabilistic arguments are difficult to establish when the majority
>> still believes in legal certainty in the same way that it believes in God.
>>     
> I am not quite sure what you wanted to say :-) Anyway - this cited
> sentence is for me a nice expression of "0 tolerance" copyright
> paranoia definition. In fact, most attorneys  say usually to their
> clients that there is nothing like legal certainty as long as the
> court verdict is known and being innocent does not give you 100%
> probability that you won't be sentenced as guilty. Everyone can be a
> suspect of committing a crime and it is just a matter of probability
> that vast majority of people are not taken to jail. This is just
> because the number of beds in jails is limited :-)
>
>   
My apologies if my analogy wasn't clear.  Many people tend to treat the 
Bible as the word of God that must be valid in all circumstances, 
choosing to ignore any ridiculous results that that may produce. 
Similarly, people unfamiliar with law also tend toward a strict 
interpretation of statute without regard to any other influences, or 
without any understanding of the body of judicial interpretation that 
surrounds those statutes.

If I may quote Oliver Wendell Holmes in /The Common Law/: "The life of 
the law has not been logic: it has been experience ... The law embodies 
the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it 
cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries 
of a book of mathematics."

A jail sentence in a case if copyright infringement would be highly 
unusual, and it is unfortunate that copyright paranoiacs have convinced 
themselves that even the most trivial of infringements puts them only 
one step away from the jail door.

The vengeful tough-on-crime lot is not about to be put off by the 
shortage of beds in a jail. It would please them enormously if the 
criminals had to sleep on the hard cold concrete floor.  That, or they 
could double up in the bunks, and the resulting sexual violence could be 
used as evidence of just how depraved these criminals are.

Ec