The Wikimedia Foundation has been involved in several lawsuits, generally regarding the content of Wikipedia. They have won some and lost others.
This listing is not meant to be exhaustive, and only includes notable cases.
In May 2011, Louis Bacon, a hedge fund manager, obtained a court order in Great Britain, where he owned property, against the Wikimedia Foundation, the Denver Post and WordPress to compel them to reveal the identity of persons who he claimed had anonymously defamed him on Wikipedia and the other two websites. However, legal experts said that the order was probably unenforceable in the United States. [1] [2]
Initially, the Foundation agreed to give the information to Bacon's solicitors, [3] but later asserted that it would cooperate only with a court order in the U.S. It said, "we do not comply with foreign subpoenas absent an immediate threat to life or limb." [1] Automattic, which owns WordPress, said Bacon would need a court order but agreed to remove any defamatory material from its websites. [3]
In January 2019, a court in Germany ruled against the Wikimedia Foundation, prompting it to remove part of the history and the allegedly defamatory content about professor Alex Waibel. The Wikipedia article's content was ruled defamatory because the link supporting its claims was no longer active, a phenomenon known as link rot. [4] [5]
The Wikimedia Foundation ultimately prevailed in a controversy in Germany involving the deceased hacker known as Tron. A German court issued an injunction against the Wikimedia chapter in Germany due to its ownership of the Wikipedia domain. The Foundation intervened and the matter was resolved.[ citation needed ][ when? ]
In January 2008, Barbara Bauer, a literary agent, sued the Wikimedia Foundation in New Jersey Superior Court for defamation. [6] [7] [8] She claimed that a Wikipedia entry branded her the "dumbest" literary agent. [7] The case was dismissed because of the protections afforded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. [8]
Professional golfer Fuzzy Zoeller, who felt that he was defamed on Wikipedia, said that he did not sue Wikipedia because he was told that his suit would not prevail, in light of Section 230. [9] He sued the Miami firm from whose computers the edits were made, but later dropped the case. [10]
In 2007, three French nationals sued the Wikimedia Foundation when an article on Wikipedia described them as gay activists. [11] [12] A French court dismissed the defamation and privacy case, ruling that the Foundation was not legally responsible for information in Wikipedia articles. [12] The judge ruled that a 2004 French law limited the Foundation's liability, and found that the content had already been removed. [11] [12] He found that the Foundation was not legally required to check the information on Wikipedia, and that "Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature." [12] He did not rule whether the information was defamatory. [11] [12]
In December 2010, Sylvia Scott Gibson, author of Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs , sued Wikipedia in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. She took issue with how editors had described her book. [13] Her suit was dismissed on September 18, 2011, with Judge Otis D. Wright II writing, "Plaintiff demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the facts, the Internet, and the law." [14]
John Seigenthaler, an American writer and journalist, contacted Wikipedia in 2005 after his article was edited to incorrectly state that he had been thought for a brief time to be involved in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and of Bobby Kennedy. The content was present in the article for four months. [7] [15] Seigenthaler called Wikipedia a "flawed and irresponsible research tool" and criticized the Communications Decency Act's protection of Wikipedia. [7]
The representative for the American Academy of Financial Management, George Mentz, suggested that either phony or incompetent Wikipedia editors were creating legal problems for Wikimedia in May 2013, because of alleged intentional false claims that had been published on Wikipedia. [16]
In 2014, Yank Barry filed a defamation lawsuit against four Wikipedia editors. [17] [18] He withdrew it after about a month.[ when? ] [19]
In 2016, Sorin Cerin sued the administrators of Romanian Wikipedia in Romanian courts, claiming "patent falsities". [20] The trial ended in 2021; the plaintiff lost the case. [21]
In 2023, French businessman Laurent de Gourcuff engaged in litigation against the Wikimedia Foundation in order to force them to reveal the IP address of a French Wikipedia editor who added content about Gourcuff that he found defamatory. [22]
In July 2024, the Indian news agency Asian News International sued for what it deemed defamatory allegations in the Wikipedia article about the company. The case is scheduled for a hearing in Delhi High Court in August 2024. [23]
Texas Instruments sent a DMCA takedown notice to the Wikimedia Foundation because certain cryptographic keys were made public in an article on the Texas Instruments signing key controversy. A Wikipedia editor later filed a counter-notice. Because Texas Instruments did not reply in 10–14 business days as required by the DMCA, the keys were restored to the article.[ citation needed ]
Two other articles also came under the purview of Wikipedia's office actions[ clarification needed ] because of the DMCA: Damon Dash and Peripheral Component Interconnect.
In July 2010, the FBI sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation demanding that it cease and desist from using its seal on Wikipedia. [24] The FBI claimed that such practice was illegal and threatened to sue.
In reply, Wikimedia counsel Michael Godwin sent a letter to the FBI claiming that Wikipedia was not in the wrong when it displayed the FBI seal on its website. [25] He defended Wikipedia's actions and also refused to remove the seal. [26]
In March 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation, along with other groups, sued the National Security Agency over its upstream mass surveillance program. [27]
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. v. WordLogic Corporation et al was a lawsuit involving the Wikimedia Foundation as plaintiff and the companies WordLogic Corporation and 602531 British Columbia, Ltd. as defendants over a patent dispute. [28] WordLogic claims that the Wikimedia Foundation and the MediaWiki free software infringes on at least Claim 19 of the U.S. patent 7,681,124 .[ why? ] [29] Wikimedia denies those claims and has moved under 28 U.S.C. §§ 2201 – 2202 for a declaratory judgment against the WordLogic entities requesting a declaration from the Court that a number of patents property of defendants are invalid, and that Wikimedia Foundation does not infringe those patents "directly or indirectly, either literally or under the doctrine of equivalents" as provided by the Title 35 of the United States Code. The case was filed on March 11, 2020, before the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. [30] On July 18, 2020, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. moved to dismiss with prejudice its own complaint. [31]
Richard Desmond is the former owner of Asian Babes and Readers' Wives. In November 2021, The Guardian reported that he has hired lawyers to force Wikipedia to remove the word "pornographer" from his biographical page. Desmond has argued that he cannot factually be described as a pornographer because that term applies only to individuals who publish illegal and obscene material. Desmond says the top-shelf magazines and television channels he owned for decades were instead in the legitimate "adult material" category distributed in high-street shops and on Sky UK. Desmond has spent years having his Wikipedia page edited in a failed attempt to remove any suggestion that he is a "pornographer", preferring the term "philanthropist". [32]
G & G vs. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. [2009] EWHC 3148 (QB) was an English legal case. The case involved "G" who sought a Norwich Pharmacal order requiring that the respondent disclose the IP address of an individual who had edited Wikipedia to include private and sensitive information about her and her child. [33] The order was granted. [34] The judgment drew attention, inter alia, in paragraph 12 to the risk that "the naming of the respondent may indirectly enable readers who already know other information about the case to identify of [sic] the claimant." The possibility is alluded to again in paragraph 40, which notes that "There are occasions when the court does impose a prohibition upon disclosure of the fact that an order has been made." [35]
Defamation is a communication that injures a third party's reputation and causes a legally redressable injury. The precise legal definition of defamation varies from country to country. It is not necessarily restricted to making assertions that are falsifiable, and can extend to concepts that are more abstract than reputation – like dignity and honour. In the English-speaking world, the law of defamation traditionally distinguishes between libel and slander. It is treated as a civil wrong, as a criminal offence, or both.
Online service provider law is a summary and case law tracking page for laws, legal decisions and issues relating to online service providers (OSPs), like the Wikipedia and Internet service providers, from the viewpoint of an OSP considering its liability and customer service issues. See Cyber law for broader coverage of the law of cyberspace.
A declaratory judgment, also called a declaration, is the legal determination of a court that resolves legal uncertainty for the litigants. It is a form of legally binding preventive by which a party involved in an actual or possible legal matter can ask a court to conclusively rule on and affirm the rights, duties, or obligations of one or more parties in a civil dispute. The declaratory judgment is generally considered a statutory remedy and not an equitable remedy in the United States, and is thus not subject to equitable requirements, though there are analogies that can be found in the remedies granted by courts of equity. A declaratory judgment does not by itself order any action by a party, or imply damages or an injunction, although it may be accompanied by one or more other remedies.
Barrett v. Rosenthal, 40 Cal.4th 33 (2006), was a California Supreme Court case concerning online defamation. The case resolved a defamation claim brought by Stephen Barrett, Terry Polevoy, and attorney Christopher Grell against Ilena Rosenthal and several others. Barrett and others alleged that the defendants had republished libelous information about them on the internet. In a unanimous decision, the court held that Rosenthal was a "user of interactive computer services" and therefore immune from liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
The multinational technology corporation Apple Inc. has been a participant in various legal proceedings and claims since it began operation and, like its competitors and peers, engages in litigation in its normal course of business for a variety of reasons. In particular, Apple is known for and promotes itself as actively and aggressively enforcing its intellectual property interests. From the 1980s to the present, Apple has been plaintiff or defendant in civil actions in the United States and other countries. Some of these actions have determined significant case law for the information technology industry and many have captured the attention of the public and media. Apple's litigation generally involves intellectual property disputes, but the company has also been a party in lawsuits that include antitrust claims, consumer actions, commercial unfair trade practice suits, defamation claims, and corporate espionage, among other matters.
American Well Works Co. v. Layne & Bowler Co., 241 U.S. 257 (1916), was a United States Supreme Court case governing the scope of federal question jurisdiction.
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Alcatel-Lucent v. Microsoft Corp., also known as Lucent Technologies Inc. v. Gateway Inc., was a long-running patent infringement case between Alcatel-Lucent and Microsoft litigated in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California and appealed multiple times to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Alcatel-Lucent was awarded $1.53 billion in a final verdict in August 2007 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in San Diego. The damages award was reversed on appeal in September 2009, and the case was returned for a separate trial on the amount of damages.
The origins of the United States' defamation laws pre-date the American Revolution; one influential case in 1734 involved John Peter Zenger and established precedent that "The Truth" is an absolute defense against charges of libel. Though the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect freedom of the press, for most of the history of the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court failed to use it to rule on libel cases. This left libel laws, based upon the traditional "Common Law" of defamation inherited from the English legal system, mixed across the states. The 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, however, radically changed the nature of libel law in the United States by establishing that public officials could win a suit for libel only when they could prove the media outlet in question knew either that the information was wholly and patently false or that it was published "with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not". Later Supreme Court cases barred strict liability for libel and forbade libel claims for statements that are so ridiculous as to be obviously facetious. Recent cases have added precedent on defamation law and the Internet.
In July 2009, lawyers representing the National Portrait Gallery of London (NPG) sent an email letter warning of possible legal action for alleged copyright infringement to Derrick Coetzee, an editor/administrator of the free content multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons, hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
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A legal dispute between webcomic The Oatmeal and content aggregator website FunnyJunk began in 2011. The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman alleged in 2011 that FunnyJunk users repeatedly infringed copyright of The Oatmeal's original content. In June 2012, FunnyJunk's lawyer, Charles Carreon, sent Inman a letter demanding US$20,000 in damages from him, alleging the claims he made were defamatory. Inman responded by publishing the letter on his site, along with a response and announcement that he would be organizing a charity fundraiser through Indiegogo, donating the amount demanded by Carreon to the American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Federation.
Theodore Katsanevas was a Greek academic and politician. He was a member of the Greek Parliament from 1989 to 2004 for the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PA.SO.K). In May 2013, Katsanevas founded the political party Drachmi Greek Democratic Movement Five Stars, which campaigns for Greece to abandon the euro and return to the drachma.
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O'Kroley v. Fastcase, Inc.,, aff'd, No. 15-6336, is a U.S. court case concerning defamation in online search results. The plaintiff, Colin O'Kroley, alleged that Google's automated snippet algorithm created a defamatory search result by falsely implying that the plaintiff had been accused of indecency with a child. The District Court granted Google's motion to dismiss the case, and found that Google had immunity from the defamation charges under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects interactive computer services from being held liable as a speaker or publisher for information provided by a third-party information content provider. On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed the District Court's decision.
Hassell v. Bird was a case heard within the California court system related to a court-ordered removal of a defamatory user review of a law firm from the Yelp website. The case, first heard in the California Court of Appeals, First District, Division Four, unanimously ruled in favor of the law firm, ordering Yelp to remove the review in 2016. Yelp refused to remove the review and appealed the decision. In July 2018, the California Supreme Court reversed the order in a closely divided 4-3 decision, stating that Yelp's position fell within Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as a publisher of user material, and was not required to comply with the trial court's removal order. However, the part of the trial court's decision that ordered the reviewer to remove the defamatory review and pay a monetary judgement were left intact. The Supreme Court of the United States denied to hear the appeal, leaving the California Supreme Court's decision.
The following is a list of notable lawsuits involving former United States president Donald Trump. The list excludes cases that only name Trump as a legal formality in his capacity as president, such as habeas corpus requests.
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