[hunter-2]

I stopped donating to Wikipedia after I learned that they were the organization behind the "Chimp selfie" lawsuit. I understood that my money was not going towards keeping the servers on, but instead in defending frivolous lawsuits like these.

In all frankness, I have no interest in letting Wikipedia die either. I just feel there are enough people who donate today that makes it easy for the foundation to do stuff beyond just keeping a Wikipedia on. Will probably donate again if their contributor pool ever shrinks.

[blululu]

I think Wikipedia funding lawyers to defend fair use interpretations of copyright is actually a very useful function to support the encyclopedia. I know it sounds stupid, but there are a lot of lawyers out there looking to make a buck off a stupid lawsuit, and copyrights on the internet are a pretty wide open field for this kind of nonsense. In order to defend things like fair use that should be obvious someone needs to pay the legal bills. This is a lot of what the EFF does and it generally strikes me as a rather important force in the context of American Civil Rights law.

[Crosseye_Jack]

Got a source on that just because I’m interested in reading more about that “shitshow”.

My understanding of it was the images were put on Wikipedia/Wikimedia because they held the belief that the images were not copyrightable (as the photo was taken by a non legal person), the photographer threatened to sue Wiki over it but I don’t recall that going anywhere. But it was actually PETA who sued the photographer after he published the photos in a book claiming the monkey should have copyright on the images.

What im interested in is was Wikimedia actually behind the lawsuit (or was it a different case, as I said that whole incident was a bit of a shitshow)

Last I heard it never got a final judgement in court so it was never settled if the monkey should have copyright, my understanding is that the case was settled out of court were the photographer agreed to hand over a share of future earnings from the photos (copyright cases get expensive very quickly, they might have seen it as the cheaper option to exit the case)

But that’s just my understanding of what went down, would love to know more. I find it an interesting case esp as we move into the realm of AI creating art.