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"Funds raised in this campaign will be used to .... provide legal defence for the projects .... " It depresses me that an institution such as Wikipedia which r
by talkingquickly 15y ago
"Funds raised in this campaign will be used to .... provide legal defence for the projects .... "
It depresses me that an institution such as Wikipedia which relatively speaking achieves so much with so little money will have to spend what I expect is a none trivial amount of its limited funds on legal defence.
- tommorris 15y agoIt's not actually that much. Most of it goes on technical: namely, servers and developers. I think they currently have two people in legal, and something like 50 in technical (development, ops etc.). I'm an OTRS volunteer - that is someone who answers email sent to the Foundation. A lot of the potential legal issues get resolved amicably by volunteers before ever hitting the legal department. An aside - one thing I've learned dealing with people making legal threats to Wikipedia: it's astounding how even some of the biggest multinational companies on the planet are completely clueless about copyright law.
- neilk 15y agoAnd thank you for doing that work! FYI, there are three FT legal now. There also are a number of legal interns at any given time. I worked with one of them in 2011 on making Commons a little more robust against potential lawsuits. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff#Legal http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff#Legal