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(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
I can think of several reasons why the Foundation
remains a non profit. If we switched to a Corporation, this would;
1) Remove tax deductible status (Think taxation, big time)
2) Undermine crediblity as a free compendium of knowledge
3) 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.
4) Open us up to SEC scrutiny
----- Original Message ----
From: Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway(a)gmail.com>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l(a)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(a)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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