Good news for Wikipedia, according to the New York Times:
A French judge has dismissed a defamation and privacy case against Wikipedia after ruling the free online encyclopedia was not responsible for information introduced onto its Web site.
The U.S.-based Wikipedia Foundation, which is behind the popular compendium, was sued by three French nationals over a Wikipedia article that said they were gay activists.
Judge Emmanuel Binoche ruled that a 2004 French law limited Wikipedia's liability and noted that contentious references in the disputed article had in any case been removed.
"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," Binoche said in his written ruling released at the Paris civil law court earlier this week.
Moreover, Web site hosts are not legally bound to monitor or investigate the origin of the information they store, he added.
Read more here. It would be interesting to see how a similar case would play out Australia, a topic I looked at (with Professor Brian Fitzgerald and Hayden Delaney in "Legal Issues for Wikis: The Challenge of User-generated and Peer-produced Knowledge, Content and Culture" for the Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law.
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