Mayor of Florence Sues Wikipedia

ZioBit writes "Florence Mayor Leonardo Domenici and one of the city assessors are suing (Google translation) Wikipedia on the basis of a (possible) defamation regarding the handling of public parkings assignation to a private company, "Florence Parking". The apparent problem is that both of their wives are members of the board of directors of "Florence Parking", and Wikipedia is reporting it."

Comments

Re:We slashdotted Google

[CriminalNerd]

Technically, we slashdotted the original article so that Google's translator couldn't translate the page, hence the error.

Defense

[Grax]

IANAL, but I looked into this type of lawsuit when someone threatened to sue me for defamation.

An absolute defense against defamation is that the stated item is the truth. For their lawsuit to succeed, it has to be premised that something untrue was said that hurt them.

Re:Defense

[autocracy]

In America, yes; the truth is not, however, a defense on its own in all countries.

Re:Defense

[rozz]

In America, yes;

the very source u cited contradicts you .. it says:

" Some U.S. statutes preserve historical common law exceptions to the defense of truth to libel actions. These exceptions were for statements "tending to blacken the memory of one who is dead" or "expose the natural defects of one who is alive." "

so no, the truth itself is not always a fool-proof legal defense in America ... and if u think about it a bit more, you may also find that truth and legal-truth are quite different things.

Re:So *who* are they actually suing?

[Toe, The]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Software_and_hardware

"Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of GNU/Linux servers, 300 in Florida, 26 in Amsterdam and 23 in Yahoo!'s Korean hosting facility in Seoul."

P.S. Gotta love those network topology diagrams. Pretty dang nice for a nonprofit. :)

Sue whom exactly.

[qbzzt]

The Wikipedia Foundation is a US corporation, which does not hold assets in Italy, so it can't be sued in an Italian court. Or, to be more accurate, it can be sued but the verdict would be meaningless.

However, Wikipedia does have an Italian chapter ( http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Local_chapters ). I assume that is the organization being sued.

Re:Added in about 20 mins time:

[erlehmann]

Here it is, it has even been corrected in virtually no time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leonardo_Domenici&diff=195140090&oldid=195132037

Non-robotic translation

[lbbros]

Notice, this was done in haste and may not be good English, but I hope it's better than an automated translation.

FIRENZE- Firenze's Mayor, Leonardo DOmenici, and local government member Graziano Cioni have given the order to sue for defamation the Wikipedia web encyclopedia (sic).

THE ACCUSATION - The reason, explained in a brief communication, is because in the "Leonardo Domenici" page on the site there are references to decisions made by the Mayor and his staff that, quoting, ''caused criticism from the citizens'', quoting in particular the award of a contract related to the management of the town's parking lots to the "Firenze Parking" company, of which Dominici and Cioni's wives have seats in the board of directors.

THE INQUIRY - The communication from the Mayor reminds that such a "defamation" had circulated in the past and that in 2004 the office of the public prosecutor had started an investigation, resulting in one indictment and a request for a trial. The Wikipedia page, however (at the time of writing) has not been modified and is still now present in the form challenged by Domenici. Hence the decision to sue for defamation and libel.

Re:Florence. where ?

[Random832]

However, Wikipedia is _not_ located in Italy. Remember the case a while back when Germany tried to get wikipedia to censor stuff? All they could do was take away the domain name "wikipedia.de" - which isn't even what's normally used to access it (the canonical url for german wikipedia articles starts "de.wikipedia.org" )