Mike Godwin signs on with Wikimedia
p2pnet news | Off Topic:- Mike Godwin is well-known around town, so to speak. He was the EFF’s (Electronic Frontier Foundation ) first staff counsel and the legal director for the digital-rights advocacy group Public Knowledge; and his Godwin’s Law is one of the net’s most heavily trafficked spots.
The Wikipedia says in its entry for the site, “an adage that Mike Godwin formulated in 1990 states, ‘As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one’.”
It goes on:
Although in one of its early forms Godwin’s Law referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions, the law is now applied to any threaded online discussion: electronic mailing lists, message boards, chat rooms, and more recently blog comment threads and wiki talk pages.
Godwin has stated that he introduced Godwin’s Law as an experiment in memetics.
Now Godwin has taken on a different role. He’s the new general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation.
“His task is to defend an online encyclopedia created by tens of thousands of (often anonymous) contributors who comment freely on living people and businesses, armed with decades of scholarship, no knowledge at all, or something in between,” says the New York Times.
“Besides the potential for defamation, there is the question of copyright infringement, among other legal traps.”
And the potential is very real.
The Wikimedia Foundation, “is a non-profit charitable organization,” says the Wikipedia.
And it’s one of many individuals and entities currently being sued by Canadian businessman Wayne Crookes who in a lawsuit which amounts to an attempt to sue the entire internet, claims linking to something he doesn’t like equals defamation.
Referring to Godwin, “Given the circumstances, it is probably better to be the kind of person who, when someone calls an opponent a Nazi, thinks ‘hey, it was only a matter of time,’ as opposed to, ’someone is going to pay for this’,” says the NYT.
Also See:
New York Times - Defending Wikipedia’s Impolite Side, August 20, 2007
equals defamation - Is freedom of speech dying online?, June 18, 2007
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