[WikiEN-l] Re: Legal paranoia

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> From: Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org>
>
> Even then there is relatively little incentive for a traditional
> encyclopedia to attack Wikipedia in the first place.

I agree, but this assumes that the attacker is a) well-informed, b)  
rational, c) primarily interested in his own business interests. My  
personal interpretation is that the SCO business shows that this is  
not always true.

> Besides, the support would come pouring in from all over
> the place.  We'd probably get plenty of legal support donated to us.

Agreed. And that sort of thing probably helped get Dmitri Sklyarov  
out of jail. But my point is, he was _in_ jail for a couple of months.

> in a case like this where we're
> actually in the right, the support would be tremendous.

> The only reason we should even consider backing down on this is if
> there's a serious legal argument that keeping this list would somehow
> taint the rest of the encyclopedia.  I highly doubt this is true, but
> I'm not a lawyer, and if a lawyer says this is plausible it's
> something we should look at hard.

The context of my comments was Jimmy Wales' comment in regard to the  
Encarta list:

 >Opinions of our legal team are
 >divided about the issue,.

Lawyers looked at it and said _they weren't sure._ This is a  
discussion about what a prudent persons does when the lawyers say  
_they're not sure._ You can interpret this to mean: "They're not sure  
there's a problem, so let's not worry about it, and certainly lets  
not worry about a list of _Britannica_ articles, or a _modified_ list  
of Encara articles. Or you can interpret this to mean "That means  
they're not sure this is OK so let's back away a bit?"

When the lawyers say they're not sure, the question is whether the  
glass is half prudent or half paranoid,

> But otherwise, if it's just a list, I don't see the problem.  The
> worst reasonable case scenario is that we have to take it down.

I think _that's_ a very good point.

> A long drawn out legal battle; a chance to set a precedent that can be
> used in the future; that'd probably be a good thing.

And that's where I part company with you. I am interested in helping  
to write an encyclopedia, not help fight in long drawn out legal  
battles.


--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/