On Saturday, 30 June 2012 at 20:22, WereSpielChequers wrote: > As for the arguments as to whether this applies to permissions Richard has in > his capacity as a volunteer; We need to keep a clear distinction between what > people do as volunteers and what they do on behalf of the UK chapter.
That wasn't the argument I made. ;-) I am perfectly capable of making the distinction between volunteer community roles and chapter work and how that all works. My problem is that the Draft Communications Bill may not be able to do likewise given how vaguely it is worded. The Foundation and the projects are kept at arms length because of s.230 of the Communications Decency Act in the U.S. so that the Foundation isn't held legally responsible as the "publisher" of content on Wikipedia, but instead delegates that publication to the community, and instead seeing themselves as the hosting company. Fine. I expect the Foundation lawyers know how to do just that, and where the line is. But, the problem is under the Draft Communications Bill, if the Secretary of State wished to serve "Wikipedia" or "Wikimedia" generally with a s.1 notice, how would that play out? Could WMUK be held responsible under this Bill? How about individual volunteers? (I picked Richard not just to pick on him, but because the law won't necessarily make the fine distinction between him being an employee and him being a volunteer who happens to have CheckUser access. We can make that distinction, the law possibly won't.) Okay, we could go one further: if Wikimedia UK were to hire as a developer someone who has sysadmin access to the Wikimedia servers (there are a few who are UK-based), how would that play out with this law? The reason I think we should think about it is precisely because it's so very badly worded. Without some informed legal thinking about what exactly the bill is likely to mean in practice, we probably can't know for sure. -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
