Grants:PEG/WM IL/Legal Opinions

Funded

This submission to the Wikimedia Foundation Grants Program was funded in the fiscal year 2009-10. This is a grant to an organization.

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Legal name of chapter

Wikimedia Israel

Grant contact name

Asaf Bartov

Grant contact user-name or e-mail

Ijon (asaf.bartov@gmail.com)

Grant contact title (position)

Wikimedia Israel member

Project lead name

Asaf Bartov

Project lead user-name or e-mail

Ijon (asaf.bartov@gmail.com)

Project lead title (position), if any

Wikimedia Israel member

Full project name

Legal Opinions for Israeli Content Liberation

Amount requested (in USD)

USD 5,000

Target start date

1st March 2010

Completion date

1st April 2010 31 December 2012

Budget breakdown

• Legal fees: USD 4,500
• Travel and misc. expenses: USD 500

Project scope

We intend to commission several legal opinions on matters of Israeli copyright law, state intellectual property, and inaccessible public domain material, all in the interest of promoting content liberation of material governed by Israeli law (the textual material is chiefly, but not exclusively, Hebrew). Wikimedia Israel is very interested in spearheading an Israeli content liberation movement, but the immediate setback is lack of legal grounding for some initiatives we'd like to take, as Israeli legislation and court precedent has not yet illuminated some of the issues.

Some examples of our objectives: State of Israel National Archives, National Library, Israeli Broadcasting Authority archives, IDF "Broadcast University", "orphan"/anonymous works.

Project goal

The outcome of this project would be a set of written legal opinions by expert Israeli law firms, clarifying copyright and public domain concerns of various non-obvious cases, and supporting content liberation projects. The opinions will be made available on Wikimedia Israel's public Web site, in both Hebrew and English, for anyone to use.

Non-financial requirements

We'd probably like to keep Mike Godwin in the picture regarding the legal opinions we receive.

Fit to strategy

The project will provide the legal infrastructure for any number of content liberation initiatives for material governed by Israeli law. It will also be a significant achievement for our chapter to be seen to be leading a content liberation effort, and we hope to generate significant positive media attention during and after the project. We intend to stress how Wikimedia Israel would foster free content and free knowledge not only through the Wikimedia projects themselves; this is to be one main outreach initiative of ours to other Israeli open content projects.

Other benefits

Positive media attention is likely, as is more cooperation with other open content initiatives, and higher visibility of Wikimedia Israel.

Measures of success

The legal opinions we will be able to make available to the public are one measure of success, but of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: we hope these legal documents would be gifts that keep on giving, providing a long-term basis for content liberation efforts in Israel.

Status

The opinions have been ordered, and we expect the Legal opinion to be on our web site in Hebrew an English by mid April 2010.

For grantees

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