[Foundation-l] German law and wikiquote

[Erik Moeller]

The legal study ordered by the German Wikimedia e.V. is mostly a summary 
of the current German law. While that has value in itself, those who 
have followed the relevant discussions will not find much new 
information in it. A more interesting study would be one of loopholes 
and ways to do an end run around copyright and trademark law:

- How to cheat museums which try to steal public domain content by 
forbidding photographs.
- How to get coat of arms images under a free or semi-free license.
- How to phrase Wikiquote pages so that they fall under the fair use 
equivalent of German law.
- How to use the fact that Wikimedia servers are in the United States to 
our advantage.

In short, instead of asking "What does the law say?", we should ask "How 
can we do what we want to do?". If the answer is "We can't", then we 
should actively work to change the laws to our advantage. If we want to 
survive, we need to be creative in the way we deal with the law, 
especially in Germany, where, tolerated by the government, a substantial 
subset of lawyers are criminals who terrorize grandmothers and 
15-year-old webmasters with illegal demands for money (google "Abmahnung").

If your perception is that, legally speaking, you are standing on a 
small island, then you will not even notice as the protections that the 
law grants you are eroded away by the ocean around you. We have to 
actively claim the ground that rightfully belongs to us, and not let 
lobbyists and corrupt governments get away with making information ever 
more proprietary.

Erik