On 4/22/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/22/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@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 If someone entrusted with the ability to see unpublished content then uses that ability to cause it to be published, then the organisation's task of showing that it took reasonable steps to prevent publication is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