Defame with impunity on Wikipedia

I agree that information should be free and free-flowing. Wikipedia was built around those principles, and around community-generated content. Unfortunately the community, or more correctly the public at large, is not as responsible as Wikipedia had expected.

Now A French judge has dismissed a defamation and privacy case against Wikipedia after ruling that the free online encyclopedia was not responsible for information introduced onto its Web site, according to this report from Reuters.

Moreover, Web site hosts are not legally bound to monitor or investigate the origin of the information they store, the Judge Emmanuel Binoche said after the online encyclopedia was sued by three French nationals over a Wikipedia article that said they were gay activists, according to the report.

Laws vary from country to country, but the overall tendency seems to be to exempt owners of community edited web-sites and social networking sites from liability for pornography or slander or other such nefarious content.

This ultra-liberal attitude when it comes to content crimes on the Internet leaves me wondering – where does that leave the individual ?

Before the arrival of online community edited news and opinion sites, the main source of potential defamation were public speeches and the newspapers, and in both cases liability for defamation is quite clear. Both the person defaming, as well as the forum which published the defamatory remarks are liable in varying degrees.

Issues of liability aside, because of the viral nature of the online medium, there is no stopping a false rumor before it starts.

Once a story is up on the net, it gets picked up by blogs, other sites, and even online newspapers. Some of them may quote the allegation, and hope to reduce liability by linking to the site from where they picked up the allegation. The upshot is that the slander is all over the place, before you can even say “ cease and desist”. By the time you have been able to identify and send a notice to the site that started it, your reputation is raked fore and aft.

In this context, the need for community edited sites and social networking sites to monitor content, and block content found objectionable is a must. Their liability should in fact be increased to make sure they acquit this responsibility. To be sure Internet companies will throw up their hands, and tell us their sites are so popular that the volume of content is more than they can filter properly.

That is a nice argument – but it is cold comfort to me if someone goes on Facebook or Wikipedia and describes me as a rapist. Sure, I can go after Facebook and Wikipedia, ask them to remove the objectionable material, identify the person who described me as a rapist, and sue him in court. But it may be all too late - the allegation is already all over the Internet.

Google has often used the analogy of the telephone to argue that the Internet service provider should be only as liable as a telephone services provider, who is not liable if a murder is plotted over the telephone. The times have changed. Two people talking on the phone, and calling me a pedophile are just two people. That is the extent of the damage. But if these two people put it out on their Orkut scrapbook or on Wikipedia, that number could jump to millions of people.

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Businesses crawling all over YouTube, Facebook

Guess who is taking a peek at your profile and activities on Facebook, Linkedin, and other social networking sites ? Businesses of course, and they are looking for you.

Social networking sites have become the top tool for hiring IT staff, according to this report in PC World.

So folks try and be careful on Facebook. Forget about being spontaneous on social networking sites, because a single loose comment could make you lose a super job offer.

There aren’t any private spaces online where you can have good, clean spontaneous fun. The corporate world has got its men on these sites. Some of them maybe reporting to your bosses

Some companies are also encouraging their staff to get on to Facebook and generally try to have fun. They believe that this interaction will strengthen bonds among company employees, provide an opportunity to recruit more people, and yes, project a super nice image of the company.

The corporate barbarians are at this gate too. When blogs became popular, and were positioned as expression that was truly spontaneous and not choreographed, companies too piggybacked on the new phenomenon.

If you thought the blogs by corporate executives would provide deep and new insights into their inner feelings, true beliefs, you were in for a big disappointment. It is corporate speak all over again, only a little more casual than a press release, and thoroughly sanitized by the company’s public relations departments.

Competitors have also started using their blogs to take shots at one another - generally the kind of stuff newspapers wouldn’t publish or you couldn’t issue a press release about.

Apart from blogs from corporate executives, which are incidentally closely harvested for news by the media, there are also blogs by folks set up corporate and other interests to defend those interests, discreetly spark of rumors etc etc.

Companies have made a beeline to video sharing sites. If it wasn’t bad enough filtering through third-rate sexy videos, bad jokes, and generally amateurish content, to get to any real nuggets on the video-sharing site, now adding to the clutter are companies who have recognized that YouTube and other sharing and networking sites are a great, and free advertising medium.

So you have video clips of Shaun White endorsing Hewlett-Packard’s Paviliion laptops, or a promotion video by Indian outsourcer, Infosys Technologies Ltd., and another from IBM.

You can’t escape those corporate signposts whether on the TV or on the highway, or online. Welcome to Web 2.0. and to the promise of communities.

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