There's a fifth reason: our employment of fair use material depends to a certain extent on our non-profit status: of the 4 factors determining the permissibility of fair use in US copyright, one of them is the profit/non-profit status of the use.
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 9:09 PM, Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com wrote:
I can think of several reasons why the Foundation remains a non profit. If we switched to a Corporation, this would;
- Remove tax deductible status (Think taxation, big time)
- Undermine crediblity as a free compendium of knowledge
- Create a big legal mess. WF would have to define stockholders which would disenfranchise several million users. In addition, these new stockholders would have a tax mess on their hands.
- Open us up to SEC scrutiny
----- Original Message ---- From: Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 5:48:50 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia
On 11/03/2008, Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com wrote:
Ads detract from the objectivity. Also, it could lead to a pain with the IRS.
If you don't read the ad (we're talking about google-style ads here, I imagine) it cannot have any effect on objectivity.
I don't know about the tax situation, but there's no reason in principle why Wikimedia (or a successor organisation) should remain subject to not-for-profit rules. Google is a corporation but the IRS doesn't seem to have killed it yet. Transition to commercial status might be a bit weird, but it's doable because the content is all under the GFDL.
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