Stuart Corner
Friday, 13 June 2008 09:32
Opinion and Analysis
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Reports have emerged revealing that, back in March this year, Telstra lawyers wrote to Wikipedia alleging that some parts of the entry on Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo were defamatory and demanding their immediate removal: Which may explain why his entry today is bereft of any reference to the many critical articles about him published in the early days of his Telstra leadership. (There is now a follow-up article on this issue)
The lawyers’ letter is
reproduced on the Chilling Effects web site , a joint venture between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and various US law schools. The letter, dated 7 March, said that, since at least March 1, 2008 an anonymous user had repeatedly inserted false and defamatory language into Sol’s entry, and that this had been repeatedly removed, but the anonymous user had repeatedly replaced the false and defamatory language.
The letter said: “We demand that Wikipedia and Wikimedia permanently remove the above language from the article, including all of its history pages, and to permanently block the anonymous user from editing the page by 7 o'clock eastern time today [March 7, 2008] . If Wikipedia and Wikimedia do not remove the improper language by that time, and take the steps necessary to block its being reinserted, [we] intend to commence litigation against Wikipedia and Wikimedia on Monday, March 10, 2008.”
However, as the entry in Chilling Effects notes, US law gives most ISPs and message board hosts the discretion to keep postings or delete them, whichever they prefer, in response to claims by others that a posting is defamatory or libellous. Also in the US, it said that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” And it noted that “This provision has been uniformly interpreted by the Courts to provide complete protection against defamation or libel claims made against an ISP, message board or chat room where the statements are made by third parties.”
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