[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Draft Terms of Use for Review

[Tom Morris]

On Thursday, September 8, 2011, Geoff Brigham wrote:

> What we would like to do is to invite you to read the draft, reflect on it,
> and leave your comments and feedback on the discussion page. We plan to
> leave this version up for at least 30 days; indeed, a 30-day comment period
> for changes is built into the new draft.
>

Okay...

"Prohibited activities include:"
"Infringing copyrights, trademarks, patents, or other proprietary rights;"

Copyright I can understand. Nobody wants copyvios.

But there are plenty of examples where we might infringe on patents.

Given that the doubly-linked list is the subject of a (possibly
unenforceable) software patent in the United States, the very act of writing
a Wikipedia article about or Wikibooks chapter on programming a linked list
may count as infringing the software patent.

The paragraph before doesn't make it clear to me whether these are forbidden
by the terms of use, forbidden by the rules of the projects or forbidden by
law. The tone of the paragraph is kind of strange: it's already illegal for
me to DDoS Wikipedia because of the UK's Computer Misuse Act etc.
Skim-reading the list may lead the reader to think this adds no new rules to
bide by beyond those imposed by the law of their country and the United
States. It'd be helpful if that could be clarified.

I'm sure when I'm not tired and on the last train home, I'll find some other
things to nitpick. ;-)

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>


-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>