On 4/22/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
Under
the Communications Decency Act
which provides a general exemption from third party liability to
online information providers, this exemption does not extend to
liability for publication by agents of the provider. A Wikipedia
administrator who uses his special powers to publish defamatory
content or copy copyright-infringing content would tend to advance the
case against Wikipedia for third-party liability.
The fallacy there is in suggesting that all admins are agents of
Wikipedia. There is nothing in any description of admins that allows
them to do anything on any site outside of a particular project. A
Wikipedia admin does not thereby receive the right to be an admin on any
sister project or even on a Wikipedia in any other language. Perhaps
you should review the meaning of "agent".
I use the term loosely. If someone entrusted with the ability to see
unpublished content then uses that ability to cause it to be
published, then the organisation's task of showing that it took
reasonable steps to prevent publication is made more difficult, for it
most demonstrate that it reasonably believed that this person would
not do so. If our admins are chosen through a popularity contest in
which their loyalty to the aims and interests of the Foundation,
rather than the community, is not examined, I think it would be very
difficult to argue that such a belief was reasonable. Basically we
let any mutt off the street act as an administrator, irrespective of
his views on, or knowledge of liability, copyright, or anything else
relevant, or his commitment to act in the interests of the Foundation.
I don't see any reason that Wikimedia has a responsibility to "take
reasonable steps to prevent the publication" of libelous information
in the first place.
In fact, I think the Foundation would be perfectly within its rights
to allow *everyone* to see the content of these allegedly libelous
historical versions. In fact, considering the fact that most libelous
versions of articles are never deleted in the first place, to argue
otherwise would essentially make the entire concept of a wiki a legal
impossibility.
Anthony