Free Knowledge&Wikimedia projects

From Devwiki

Olivier Hugot

It is often said that regulations are always one step behind when it comes to technology and the internet. As much as this is true in general, the legal issues raisons by the Wikimedia projects tend to be complex due to the mix of their specificities: the contents are user-generated and user-controlled, the Wikimedia Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, and the projects are truly worldwide with active participants and chapters in many countries.

It is often said that regulations are always one step behind when it comes to technology and the internet. As much as this is true in general, the legal issues raisons by the Wikimedia projects tend to be complex due to the mix of their specificities: the contents are user-generated and user-controlled, the Wikimedia Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, and the projects are truly worldwide with active participants and chapters in many countries. Each of these aspects raise different legal questions: the Wikimedia Foundation faces issues similar to the so-called web 2.0 operators (such as the allocation of liability between the Foundation and its users, especially in case of copyright infringement and defamation), has to find a way to comply with numerous and sometimes contradictory set of rules on important issue (such as data retention), and has to do this with a limited budget as opposed to website operators generating equivalent web traffic.