Your firm needs to tighten up its money laundering procedures - that is an insufficient level of client due diligence. If you are not confident your client is who he says he is then you should not act. If something were to go wrong, your firm would face civil proceedings and it (and potentially you personally) could face an LCS investigation or even prosecution.

This is just protectionism - why shouldn't American companies be able to hire whoever they want?

Good luck persuading a court of that - last I checked those "tax protestor" arguments had a batting average of zero.

I'm aware that post-modernists believe it is a self-evident truth that there is no such thing as a self-evident truth.

Well that's just not true - Wikipedia could accept copyrighted photos subject to an absolute irrevocable non-exclusive licence for their use on wikipedia (with attribution). A simple click-through licence would suffice.

As a matter of UK law, the gallery's position is most likely correct. How it enforces this against Wikipedia and/or the user in question is a different story...

Or they could just be an innocent citizen arrested by the secret police of a totalitarian state that denies freedom to its own people?

Just a thought.

You are confusing the European Court of Human Rights (relevant to this case, irrelevant to the USA) with the International Criminal Court (which the US hasn't signed up to but which is irrelevant to this case)

The problem is that the study was limited to Wikipedia articles covering mainstream science, and the quality of these is generally very good. The quality goes downhill very rapidly the further one gets away from the mainstream, whether in science, history, politics or anything else.

I think you are right. I'm not a German lawyer, but on the basis of European law she has a couple of excellent arguments:

First, under the Distance Selling Directive she has 30 days to return the software and receive a refund (how precisely this applies to downloads is unclear, but it certainly applies).

Second, under Council Directive 93/13/EEC, unfair terms in consumer contracts are unenforceable. A hidden term that the consumer pay a fee for software that is normally free is likely to be regarded as "unfair".

I assume Germany has implemented these Directives into local law - it certainly should have done. So she should refuse to pay under the Distance Selling Directive, and have the Unfair Terms Directive as a fallback.

Amazing so many people are so confident she has to pay.