A French court has ruled that Wikipedia could not be held responsible for content posted by its users in a landmark ruling for the Internet giant, officials said Friday.
Three plaintiffs were each seeking 69,000 euros (100,000 dollars) in damages for invasion of their privacy after their homosexuality was revealed on the website, which is written and edited by thousands of anonymous contributors.
But a judge rejected their demands in a ruling reached on Monday, arguing that “the Wikimedia Foundation’s responsibility … has not been clearly established,” a decision welcomed by the foundation.
“The decision is very clear and we appreciate the fact the court acknowledges our role as an Internet host, rather than an editor,” said Florence Devouard, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation’s board.
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is an “open-source” Internet encyclopedia, which is to say anyone with access to a computer can edit it. The Foundation’s task is to work out ground rules and editorial policy and raise funds to pay for IT investments and development projects.
Devouard said the contested information was added anonymously to a Wikipedia article before being “quickly withdrawn, even if it remained accessible for a while through the site’s records.”
One of the plaintiffs “sent an e-mail which we never received before turning to his lawyer,” she said.
“When we are informed of this type of mistake we always try to react in the following hours to withdraw such information,” said Devouard, who is based near the central French city of Clermont-Ferrand.
With eight million articles and counting, in 250 languages from English and Arabic to Tagalog or Wolof, Wikipedia says it is used each month by more than 100 million people.
Although its accuracy is reportedly on a par with the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia has also faced a mounting battle against misinformation and information vandalism.
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It seems that newsgroup users will be the next target of the RIAA’s wrath with a new lawsuit filed on behalf major record labels against Usenet.com. It’s always been hoped that Usenet would stay under the radar while the RIAA, MPAA, and others focused on the more mainstream P2P services like Napster, Aimster, Grokster, and KaZaA, but it seems as though the party may be nearing an end.
Filed on October 12th, the suit claims that the Fargo, North Dakota-based Usenet.com service “…sells access to a body of content from a global network of computers” that “…contains…millions of copyrighted sound recordings” and “…touts its service as a haven for those seeking pirated content.”
The complaint even cites Usenet’s own “about” section with the following:
Today’s hottest way of sharing MP3 files over the Internet is Usenet; forget about all the peer-to-peer software applications, which quickly become outdated. Usenet allows everyone around the world to share their files on a worldwide network of peer servers and make them available to any member of this worldwide network.
A usenet is comprised of a large number of servers that communicate with each other. An individual user reads and posts messages to a company’s local computer server. Messages are stored on that server and then exchanged with other servers.
Usenet.com loads online bulletin boards(newsgroups) obtained from the usenet network onto its server and then sells access to the newsgroups that it has chosen to host on its usenet.com service.
The suit claims that many of the newsgroups that usenet.com chooses to offer “are explicitly dedicated to copyright infringement.”
The complaint continues:
Users of Defendant’s service post copyrighted sound recordings to these newsgroups on Defendant’s services; the works are identified by artist and title so that users can easily find any sound recordings they might want to copy. Those copyrighted works are then propagated worldwide, allowing millions of users of the Usenet network, including Defendant’s own subscribers, to copy copyrighted sound recordings with ease and anonymity – and without authorization.
It sums up its lawsuit with the claim that Usenet.com “provides essentially the same functionality that P2P services such as Napster, Aimster, Grokster, and and did,” and that it even goes further than them by customizing “…its services to make it as convenient and seamless as possible for subscribers to distribute and obtain copyrighted music without authorization and without paying for music.”
It’s too early to tell how things will paly out, but one thing’s for sure – the RIAA is leaving no stoned unturned in its scorched earth legal strategy.
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The Minnesota woman a federal jury ordered to pay $222,000 for unlawfully pirating digital music tells THREAT LEVEL she is innocent and was the subject of a computer hack, a position federal jurors in Duluth, Minnesota, rejected Thursday after five hours deliberating.
“I want people to know that they are being sued based on hacked, spoofed computers. They should still fight back in these cases,” Jammie Thomas, 30, said in a telephone interview moments ago. “I have to pay for somebody else’s actions.”
Thomas, a single mother of two from Brainerd, Minnesota, is among the 20,000-plus individuals the Recording Industry Association of America has sued in the past four years. She was found liable for 24 songs and ordered to pay $9,250 per track in penalties. She faced fines as high as $3.6 million.
Her case was the first to go to trial, while the bulk of them have settled and others are pending.
When the verdict was read, she said she became “disgusted because I didn’t do this.”
She said she would not settle the case before trial. “I wasn’t going to pay for something I didn’t do,” she said. She and her attorney, Brian Toder, are mulling whether to appeal the judgment.
The RIAA put on evidence that the internet protocol address and cable modem account linked to her internet service provider was sharing some 1,700 files on the Kazaa program on Feb. 21, 2005. Thomas was logged in to Kazaa using the name Tereastarr, jurors found.
Thomas uses Tereastarr on her e-mail accounts, for online shopping, on MySpace, and even with an online dating service.
When asked if she was going to buy any new music, she said “I don’t have any money for that.”
The Native American woman works as an administrator at a local tribe and said she would worry about the financial implications of paying the judgment “when I cross that bridge.”
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