[Foundation-l] Re : Legal on meta-wimedia

[Anthere]

Thanks you Villy.

As a reminder, Villy is a legal professional in France, with quite a reasonable number of years of experience. He has already helped Wikimedia in several ways with his expertise, such as in writting with JB Soufron the french local chapter bylaws; in writing Stock.xchng legal analysis on wikicommons, in drafting the agreement between Mandrasoft and Wikimedia (for CD production). He also helped privately on other legal issues, and is naturally the foundator of the very near-birth french arbitration committee.

I think it is important that such departements as the legal one are created, for two reasons. First of all, we need legal counselling not only on internal issues, but on external as well. 
We still have a long pending privacy policy to fix, and would not it be nice to finally get a decent terms of use ? We need to proceed along the ways of licence... in particular since now the creative commons are getting in the light, and with the beginning of wikinews as well.

We hope more local chapters will be created, expect legal work on donations so as the donators to get tax refunds etc... and as wikipedia is working, I hope we can rely on internal abilities rather than paying a professional who know nothing of our way of dealing with things.

Naturally, there are the agreements, such as hosting ones... also needing several eyes on them.

There is, I think, a second reason why we need to slowly work out a more organised legal resource... I expect one day we could get in real trouble with an organisation we irritated. We also need to show those giving us money, that we are organised. It will make us look more professional to simply show we are serious.

So, I hope that we slowly work out in this direction and learn to rely more on the resources we have among us.

Ant

-----------

Hello,
I've created :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal_department
and the category
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Legal
in order to centralize issues, people and skills related to legal questions. 
Hopefully, this will getting useful.
villy ~~JC 




Anthere

http://fr.wikipedia.org
http://anthere.shaihome.net/
		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!