[Foundation-l] Korean Wikipedians charged with "criminal defamation:" a potential threat of censorship

[Ziko van Dijk]

Dear colleague Puzzlet,

Thank you for passing through the information. Do you already have a
large press reaction? And how about writing an English article about
the person in question? I may know people who would like to translate
into other languages. :-)

Kind regards
Ziko


2010/12/22 Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com>:
> The Colorado law has been significantly weakened in the past year. See Mink v. Knox, No. 08-1250 (10th Cir. July 19, 2010), slip. op. at 26.
>
> -Dan
>
> On Dec 22, 2010, at 5:51 AM, Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> An example of an actual prosecution:
>>
>> http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=20937
>>
>> Fred
>>
>>> This seems to be an example of the trouble that the Wikipedia:Biographies
>>> of living persons policy on the English Wikipedia is crafted to avoid,
>>> unsourced or poorly sourced negative information about a living person
>>> can be removed immediately by any editor. Here, if I'm reading right, it
>>> was put back up again despite being repeatedly removed.
>>>
>>> Another aspect of this is that if there is a law around, even a disused,
>>> rarely enforced law, the possibility exists that someone will evoke it
>>> and put you into court with baleful consequences, even if you "win" in
>>> the end. For example in Colorado there is a criminal libel law that
>>> covers the dead, see
>>> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Defamation#Criminal_defamation
>>> How one could fully comply with such a monstrosity as that is beyond me.
>>>
>>> Fred
>>>
>>> User:Fred Bauder
>>>
>>>
>>>> At most four Korean Wikipedians are charged with defamation of Song
>>>> Young-gil, the Mayor of Incheon Metropolitan City.
>>>>
>>>> According to the contributors, the prosecution is upon the Song's own
>>>> request, and is going to be over publicizing a fabricated sex scandal
>>>> in the article about him and (semi-)protecting it.  The text in
>>>> question is merely a sum-up of various reports about the speculations
>>>> eventually found to be a hoax.  Non-logged-in user(s) from various IP
>>>> addresses have tried to remove the whole controversy section,
>>>> including not only the scandal but other arguments about him,
>>>> replacing it with personal contrary comments and legal threats.  The
>>>> edits are consequently reverted by some users and rollbacked by one
>>>> administrator.  The admin, [[ko:User:Kys951]], is also accused of
>>>> being an abettor just because he is an admin.
>>>>
>>>> In the South Korean legal system, criminal defamation is partially a
>>>> "crime upon complaint," (ì¹œê³ ì£„/親告罪) which becomes irrelevant
>>>> to
>>>> be a
>>>> crime when the complainant chose to withdraw the case.  (Note that I'm
>>>> not a specialist of law, especially in English terminology.)  The
>>>> police of Southeastern Incheon thought the case itself is too
>>>> insignificant to be a criminal case and tried to persuade him to
>>>> withdraw it, only to be declined.
>>>>
>>>> Song has reportedly demanded the admin to remove the paragraph in
>>>> exchange for fixing the charge, which is definitely not the way how
>>>> Wikipedia works.
>>>>
>>>> Another concern about this incident is that this could happen to every
>>>> bit of contribution to the project.  South Korean government had been
>>>> censoring any scribble on the web they think beneficial to North
>>>> Korea,[2] and for later on, anything they think "fraudulent" whenever
>>>> the state is in "threat," according to an exclusive report.[3]
>>>>
>>>> [1]
>>>> https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ko/w/index.php?title=%EC%86%A1%EC%98%81%EA%B8%B8&diff=5832689
>>>> [2]
>>>> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/shame_on_democratic_south_korea_for_censoring_face.php
>>>> [3] http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/economy/it/455022.html
>>>>
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>>>
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-- 
Ziko van Dijk
The Netherlands
http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/