Post Tagged with: "wikipedia"

CBC.ca on Wikipedia

CBC.ca examines Wikipedia and the willingness of courts and law enforcement to rely on it.

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July 5, 2007 Comments are Disabled News

Lawsuits Put Online Free Speech At Risk

My weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) focuses on the defamation lawsuits launched in British Columbia by Wayne Crookes against a who's who of the Internet, including Yahoo!, MySpace, and Wikipedia.  Those companies are accused of defaming Crookes not by virtue of anything they have said, but rather by permitting their users to post or link to articles that are allegedly defamatory.

The lawsuits could prove to be critically important to the Internet in Canada, because they cast the net of liability far wider than just the initial posters.  Indeed, the lawsuits seek to hold accountable sites and services that host the articles, feature comments about the articles, include hyperlinks to the articles, fail to actively monitor their content to ensure that allegedly defamatory articles are not reposted after being removed, and even those that implement the domain name registrations of sites that host the articles.

The common link with all of these targets is that none are directly responsible for alleged defamation.  Rather, the Crookes lawsuits maintain that Internet intermediaries should be held equally responsible for such content.

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April 30, 2007 18 comments Columns

Lawsuits Put Online Free Speech At Risk

Appeared in the Toronto Star on April 30, 2007 as Lawsuits Put Online Free Speech At Risk Despite garnering only limited media attention, two recently filed defamation lawsuits in British Columbia have the potential to reshape free speech on the Internet in Canada.  The suits pit Wayne Crookes, a B.C.-based […]

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April 30, 2007 8 comments Columns Archive

Must Reads

This has been an exceptionally busy week, but I don't want some important stories to fall through the cracks: The NY Times on how courts are citing Wikipedia entries with growing frequency, while Simon Chester at Slaw provides a comparative Commonwealth look at the issue. Romania's President tells Bill Gates […]

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February 1, 2007 5 comments News