[WikiEN-l] Re: Legal paranoia

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 8/29/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
> > 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.


SCO didn't sue a non-profit charity, they sued the behometh IBM, along with 
Novell and AutoZone. Then RedHat sued *them* asking for a declaratory 
judgement. If you're going to draw an analogy between this and the SCO case, 
it would be like if SPI (makers of Debian) started ripping out sections of 
the Linux kernel in fear that SCO *might* sue them.

If anyone is going to go bankrupt there, it's SCO.

> 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.


As Ray said, no one is going to go to jail here. Bringing that up only 
spreads paranoia.

> 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,


The way I interpreted it, the lawyers said they weren't sure whether or not 
it was legal for us to distribute the list. The question I was asking was 
whether or not it was possible for the list to taint the rest of the 
encyclopedia, such that even if we removed the list, the encyclopedia would 
still be infringing. If that's true, then we definitely need to remove the 
list. Of course, if that's true we have to do more than just remove the list 
anyway.

> 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.


And it's essentially the whole of my argument.

> 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.


Simply writing an encyclopedia might be all that you're interested, but 
Wikimedia goes well beyond that. In my opinion reducing the chilling effects 
of copyright law goes directly to the business of the charity. The sad thing 
is, we seem to be self-applying the chilling effects at this point.

Anthony