[Wikipedia-l] California court ruling on responsibility for content

Fri Mar 7 11:53:26 UTC 2003

Axel Boldt wrote:
> I don't think it affects us: the reasoning of the court was that
> Matchmaker.com is partly responsible for the content because they
> partly created it, by providing the user with a long series of yes/no
> questions and targeted essay questions to produce the ad. But the
> Wikipedia non-profit doesn't do anything like that.

That's right, to an extent.  But the Wikipedia non-profit does have a
significant hand in directing the content.  If I edit (which I rarely
do), this is more obvious.

Under this good part of DMCA, if the nonprofit neglects to police the
pages, and someone posts libel or similar, the nonprofit is not liable
in any way, plus the nonprofit has a simple defense that gets the
whole suit tossed out before it gets to a jury, so the cost of defense
is low.

Without this defense, i.e. if someone argues that by setting
standards, occassionally editing, posting here in the mailing list to
set policy and mediate conflicts, that I (representative of the
nonprofit) am "partly responsible for the content", then a case like
that could end up before the jury.

> Any harmful content
> posted on Wikipedia was created completely independently by the
> (ab)user. All the prodding they got from us was a textbox and a
> blinking cursor.

That would certainly be the argument that I'd make in court.

--Jimbo