On 03/05/07, Andrew Lau <netsnipe(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Now that the desperately needed legal advice is
apparently not
forthcoming, it may eventually appear to outsiders that we are
paranoid of what the AACS/MPAA may do to us instead of only being
cautious. I am starting to feel uncomfortable that many administrators
such as myself may be acting unilaterally over the matter based upon
our own personal (mis)interpretations of the DMCA instead of enforcing
an official stance or community consensus.
So how exactly should we respond to the press regarding this?
As I said on the blog:
A flashmob of fight-the-power morons are still spamming an allegedly
illegal number into every input box on the web. The Wikipedia admins
collectively declared "FUCK OFF YOU SPAMMERS." (Some have gone rabid
"ZOMG LAWSUIT" and we were getting a pile of oversight requests as
well ― I didn't zap, Fred did, until Erik told us not to. Mind you, it
nicely short-circuited the idiotic deletion review.) Eventually it was
put into the spam filter, because distributed spam is spam.
We're a project to write an encyclopedia, not a public graffiti wall.
You want to paint "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0″ in
fifty-foot high letters on every Hollywood studio, I'll buy brushes.
You want to splatter it across Wikipedia, you can fuck off. I expect
the article will contain the number in due course; I'd guess two to
four weeks, any earlier would in my opinion only encourage further use
of Wikipedia as a graffiti wall.
(The number is still in the spam filter, I've asked if there's any way
to tell when it'll be safe to take it out.)
- d.