Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-07-07/Defamation suit dismissed

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A New Jersey Superior Court judge dismissed a defamation-of-character suit against the Wikimedia Foundation on July 1. The case involved a claim made by another organization, which was subsequently cited within a Wikipedia article.

Literary agent Barbara Bauer's Wikipedia biography (since deleted) reported her company's appearance on a list of "twenty worst literary agencies" from the Writer Beware section of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website, compiled based on the volume of complaints received by Writer Beware. Some versions also reported claims that Bauer had used legal threats to suppress criticism. The article was deleted on April 7, 2007 following its second deletion discussion. Although there were many editors in favor of keeping the article and all negative material was explicitly sourced, the closing administrator found that "concerns about the quality of sourcing, and issues of NPOV and BLP, were not answered in the debate, and outweighed any weight of numbers in favour of keeping the article." Bauer was first reported to have sued the WMF (among others) in March 2007, but the administrator who closed the discussion discounted arguments that invoked the lawsuit.

In the decision, Judge Jamie S. Perri cited Wikimedia's argument that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects the WMF from liability, as an "interactive computer services" provider rather than a traditional publisher that directly controls published content (although the WMF is one of many users of the service).

The lawsuit marked the first test of the legal reasoning that underlies some decisions of the Wikipedia community and the WMF regarding treatment of material involving living people. It is widely assumed that Section 230 protects the Foundation in cases where damaging content published on its websites is provided by others. The law states that "[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." As a May 2 EFF press release argued, "Section 230's blanket protection of sites like Wikipedia does not mean that alleged defamation on the Internet cannot be challenged in court. Instead, the law requires that litigants direct their efforts at the speakers themselves and not the forums where statements were made."

In cooperation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Foundation was represented by Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP. The case, Bauer et al. v. Glatzer et al., is still ongoing, with 19 individuals and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America still named as defendants.