[Foundation-l] Partnership with Mandrakesoft

[Erik Moeller]

Angela-
> Mandrakesoft are aware of our editing processes. They know what they
> are getting, and that the content has not been verified. They have
> agreed to take legal responsibility for this.

Well, we obviously can't stop them from doing it. As long as we've  
publicly and privately disclaimed liability, I think we're reasonably safe  
from a legal position. But please do not underestimate the legal mess they  
could get into. It's not just image tagging. It's quite likely that there  
are at least a few hundred undetected copyvios on en: and fr:, from books,  
unindexed websites, closed electronic archives, newspaper articles,  
magazines, journals, and so forth, and probably even quite a few Google- 
indexed pages or articles which contain small fragments thereof.

This is not because people are malicious but because many people simply  
have no concept of copyright. It is a stupid idea to begin with, so it  
takes quite a while for people to grasp the notion that certain sequences  
of words can be owned. Even with people understanding the concept of IP in  
one context (music, movies) they often have difficulties translating it  
into other contexts (texts, images, recipes ..)

Therefore, this:
> It's great advertising for us, it's
> great as an early trial of distributing our content offline, and it's
> great for raising awareness of the need to tag images properly.

seems a little too enthusiastic. "Raising awareness" is not always a good  
thing if it leads to lawsuits and headlines like "Wiki-fiddlers steal from  
many sources". Also, we are *aware* of the need to tag images properly.
May I suggest that the board promote these two things to get the process  
into motion:
1) make open list of untagged images and announce properly on community  
portal and the like that all of these images which are not tagged by date  
N will be hidden
2) fix stupid upload form
(They should happen at the same time.)

Regards,

Erik