Internet Life

Wikipedia Not Responsible for the Content Published on Its Page

The judge said

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

5th of November 2007, 09:21 GMT

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A French court decided that Wikipedia is not guilty in the defamation and privacy case brought by three French nationals, Reuters reported today. It all started some time ago when an article published on the web encyclopedia informed the readers that the three residents were "gay activists," the same source adds.

As you know, Wikipedia is an open-source technology which means all the users are able to add and edit the articles for free. That's why numerous stories might contain false information as all the consumers can modify the entries anytime they want. The judge considered that Wikipedia cannot be accused of defamation since the users are the ones who post the information on the official website.

"Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature," Judge Emmanuel Binoche said according to Reuters. "Moreover, Web site hosts are not legally bound to monitor or investigate the origin of the information they store, he added," Reuters continued.

If you analyze the case, you can easily see a similarity between Wikipedia and Google's video sharing technology YouTube which was often sued by a lot of companies and persons for copyright infringement. Their main accusation was that YouTube published videos without approval which obviously means copyright infringement. But Google always defended itself pointing to the DMCA act which states that a service (in our case YouTube) cannot be blamed for the content appearing on its page because the users are the ones who control the content.

YouTube even won lawsuits using this 'weapon': Daniela Cicarelli, Ronaldo's ex-wife, lost the lawsuit she brought against the video sharing technology after the judge considered that YouTube is not responsible for the content appearing on the page.

Sure, the services cannot be attacked for the material published on their website, but both Wikipedia and YouTube have to do something to filter it and remove the inappropriate content sent by the users.

TAGS:

wikipedia | lawsuit

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