[WikiEN-l] Office actions

[theProject]

On 12/17/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> We still have the odd cases like Gregory Lauder-Frost where the office
> action was the result of his legal advisors stating that we could not
> mention his conviction for fraud because of the UK's Rehabilitation of
> Offenders Act.  That demands actual legal advice.  As it happens, the
> Act only prevents "spent" convictions being mentioned in a defamatory
> way, there is no apparent restriction on coverage in a neutral,
> independent biography, and his friends did not help his case by
> initially including the case but claiming that he had been cleared on
> appeal - it was possible (though certainly not trivial) to verify that
> this was simply not true, and it was only when we included the
> citations to back up the conviction and failed appeal that they pulled
> the office stunt.


Whoa, whoa, whoa. How would Wiki[m/p]edia, in the United States, be subject
to a law in the United Kingdom? Just because some country has a law that
would prevent Wikipedia from stating something about some particular topic
doesn't mean Wikipedia has to follow it. If we followed North Korean or
Chinese or Iranian laws on free speech, I have the feeling some of our
articles would be pretty blank. :-)

Or should we even try discussing that, because most of us aren't lawyers?

-- 
theProject