[Foundation-l] Litigation costs

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
The legal cost are not exactly zero if you do not get to court. It is poor
practice when you relate the amount of money to the amount of money spend on
court cases. I agree with you that people are likely to help out when we do
go to court. I even agree that it may even be a good thing to go to court,
but this should be a high profile case like this Chinese company flouting
the GFDL and using the whole of the zh.wikipedia.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On Jan 8, 2008 2:58 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jan 8, 2008 4:26 AM, Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Robert Rohde writes:
> >
> > >  Obviously, we don't want to press law suits when we are in the
> > > wrong, but we
> > > also shouldn't be shying away from legally permissible fair use simply
> > > because we are afraid that every so often there will be a fight over
> > > it.  I
> > > am oft-reminded that man has only those freedoms that he is prepared
> > > defend.  Well, fair use is one of those freedoms, and in such
> > > circumstances
> > > that invoking fair use is a necessary and justified means of improving
> > > Wikipedia/Wikimedia, we should be willing to defend that right.
> >
> > Then I think the obvious next question is, how much money (in dollars
> > or Euros) should we be willing to allocate every year to the defense
> > of cases we believe we will likely win?  Or, to put it another way,
> > how much of our budget (in percentages) should we be willing to
> > allocate every year to the defense of cases we believe we will win?
> >
> > I assume because of your position as stated here you believe we should
> > be willing to spend all the money we now have (or more) in doing so,
> > because to do anything less would be an unacceptable compromise.
> >
> > Don't mistake me for a wild idealist.  I recognize there do need to be
> practical considerations, but if we are really planning for a $4M budget,
> then setting aside say $200k (5%) to defend cases where we believe that we
> are in the right seems like a more than reasonable starting point (in
> addition to money set aside to address other legal issues).  Not to
> mention
> that I continue to believe that a legal defense of Wikipedia would be a
> very
> effective rallying point to draw additional funds and the support of like
> minded organizations (e.g. EFF, etc.)
>
> However, if we are really going to talk about practical legal concerns,
> would anyone with inside information be willing to state exactly how many
> times WMF has been sued over fair use concerns?  As far as I know, the
> number of actual suits may even be zero.
>
> I know Wikipedia gets copyright complaints.  Some are justified and we
> should take down inappropriate materials.  A few are abusive (i.e.
> nonsensical copyright claims with little to no support in law).  I can
> even
> think of examples where obviously bogus complaints were willfully ignored,
> but I can't think of a single example of a copyright complaint that
> actually
> escalated to a law suit.  If you know different, please correct me.
>
> So, if we are going to talk about the practical risk, then we ought to ask
> whether the system as presently exists has actually ever resulted in a
> demonstrably negative legal impact.  Wikimedia is an enormous and high
> profile content provider.  If we have never (or almost never) been sued
> regarding copyright then frankly, I suspect we are already too
> conservative.  Simply as a product of our success we ought to expect and
> be
> prepared to defend the occassional frivilous lawsuit.
>
> -Robert Rohde
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