[Foundation-l] Fwd: [WL-News] Wikimedia Foundation in danger of losing immunity under the Communications Decency Act

[Thomas Dalton]

>  I'll note that Wikileaks is wrong to assert that the Foundation
>  removed the stories. (And Slashdot is wrong to repeat this
>  assertion.)  If that had been our method of operation, I could have
>  removed the stories myself. Instead, we went to great lengths to
>  explain what our legal concerns were, privately, to representatives of
>  the community.

The WMF expressing legal concerns about the stories is effectively
identical to the WMF removing the stories. The WMF wants the stories
gone, the stories go - that's the short of it. If the general counsel
of the WMF tells you there are legal concerns regarding one of your
articles, you delete the article, you don't have any say in the
matter, regardless of whether or not the WMF actually demands
deletion.

That said, the WMF removing stories because of legal concerns has
always been accepted (albeit reluctantly) by the community as
something the WMF has to do. The WMF has a responsibility to obey the
law, whether we like it or not. There is a big difference between
removing the articles due to legal concerns and, as Wikileaks seems to
claim, censoring articles critical of Wikipedia. As long as it was
just the former (and I have no evidence to suggest otherwise), I have
no problem with it.

I think the claims about losing CDA protection stem from a simple
misunderstanding of terminology. When the CDA talks about publishing
something, that refers to the bit where someone presses the "submit"
button. When Wikinews talks about publishing something, the refer to
the bit where it's decided that an article is ready to be removed from
the "in development" section. The articles were, as I understand it,
removed inbetween those two stages. As far as the CDA is concerned,
the WMF stepped in post-publication to remove content they saw a
problem with, which they are certainly allowed to do.