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

[Ray Saintonge]

Tomasz Ganicz wrote:
> Legal decision should be taken out from project's communities
> "jurisdiction"  and given into hands of professional lawyers or at
> least people who had copyright law practical training. Otherwise
> things are based on current flows of moods of amorphous communities,
> which is quite often unpredictable and has very little in common with
> real legal problems, or it is even sometimes based on false over
> interpretation of law imposed by copyright paranoia guerillas. 
>
>   
In practical terms when many thousands of images are having their legal 
status questioned a proper and detailed response on each one from the 
lawyer(s) is unrealistic.  Practical training would make sense, but 
would it be at all possible to teach these people common sense? I'm sure 
that many of these paranoiacs still click yes to shrink-wrap contracts 
about which they don't have a clue about.  The fact that a program won't 
work without it is convincing enough for them.

It's important to remember that the role of lawyers is to advise, 
including an assessment of the possible risks related to different 
options. Once that is done it's up to the person receiving the advice to 
decide how much risk is acceptable. What seems to have developed with 
the Wiki projects is a system where no-one is in a position to accept 
personal responsibility for anything he does. No-one is in a position to 
say, "I accept legal responsibility for the images that I upload, and I 
accept the risks and consequence of any legal action that may result 
therefrom."

Ec