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Company Fined €25,000 For Altering Wikipedia
hcs_$reboot writes "A French court ordered a company to pay 25,000 Euros to a competitor about which she had removed the name of a Wikipedia entry dedicated to her field. Hi-Media, the defendant, was identified thanks to her IP address found from the Wikipedia page."
That summary makes no sense whatsoever; can someone translate?
-SaNo
Now we can sue you for recommending our pages for speedy deletion. Take that!
sorry I only speak English :P
http://chimpbox.us
If this sort of lawsuit becomes the norm, we can *definitely* expect a chilling effect.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Since when is Wikipedia an appropriate place to advertise?
My French is rather rusty... but here's a go:
A company (A) had removed the name of their competitor (B) form the (French) Wikipedia article on Micropayments. Thanks to Wikipedia's logs the company who had their name removed (B) was able to identify the culprit as their competitor (A) and sued, successfully claiming 25,000 € in damages.
French natives, please correct me if I'm misreading here. :)
.: Max Romantschuk
Hi-Media and Rentabiliweb both are micropaiement businesses (micropaiement probably being the French word for micropayment). Hi-Media went on to Wikipedia and, under the list of companies on the micropaiement article, removed Rentabiliweb's entry. Rentabiliweb could have just edited the article, and restored their entry, but instead they sued and somehow won â25,000.
Personally, I can't see how Hi-Media did anything wrong enough to justify such a huge fine. At worst, it was wikipedia vandalism, which merits a warning, and if continued, a ban. At best, if their edit was in good faith (it probably wasn't) it merits no punishment.
I can't tell exactly, but I think Hi-Media also claimed that Rentabiliweb identified them illegally, using the IP address listed on the page to which I linked earlier. Lol, noobs.
If you are removing publicly available (and seemingly correct) information about a competitor from a publicly available website, this can be easily be considered anticompetitive behaviour.
This sounds like a case of company A saying something about company B, so company A sues company B. It sounds like Wikipedia was just the venue and that the person who made the edit was just an employee. In other words, this sounds more like business law than anything that has to do with the freedom of speech.
since they're the ones whose terms of service were violated by the malicious edits
You assume the edits were malicious, and they weren't actually removing a relatively unknown non-notable Micropayments company from a list of 'notable micropayment companies'
Or claiming such in good faith
The Wiki was working as it should be; if the company actually was notable, there should have been no problem simply reverting the edit.
Sounds like an attempt to use the courts to make an end-run around Wikipedia policy and editor consensus
i am not for sure, but I believe that the following is happening here company A Sues Company B for a Wiki edit. The edit was erasing company A's name from wikipedia. Company B's IP range was tied to the edit. Company A and Company B are both in competition with eachother. It is like Pepsi soda erasing Coke soda's wiki Entry and Coke suing for internet defacing.
If you want to be anonymous on Wikipedia, you have to get yourself a name. If you post as an IP, its much easier to find you.
Fandroids hate facts.
The triviality of an act does not mean it is trivial. For some people, it is trivial to steal a car. With a nice repo-man's tow truck, I can steal cars REALLY fast and it doesn't even require lock picking skillz. In fact, the relative ease in which a bladed instrument can be plunged into the heart of another human should be an even more dramatic example of something that is trivial to perform but is not trivial in nature.
So when one company sets out to limit the exposure of another, this is trivial to do on wikipedia, but it is, in truth, anti-competitive behavior and should be punished fiercely. You can stack all kinds of ridiculous technological measures out there, but the party(s) involved already knew it was wrong and should have known it might even be criminal.
In short, the idea that it's not "so" wrong because it's too easy is kinda weak.
TFA has an image of the Wikipedia edit. I found it, and they removed a link from a list of Plates-formes, whatever that is.
I don't know about the French Wikipedia, but on the English one, "Links to individual web pages that primarily exist to sell products or services...", as these appear to be, are "normally to be avoided". And in fact, the current article has only a list of internal links.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
The RIAA determines identity based on an IP address and we get complaints and reams of technical reasons why it is inaccurate. The identity of false editor is determined from an IP in a Wikipedia edit log, and successfully sued, and we all cheer freedom and openness. Now I hate the RIAA's litigious actions as much as the next guy, but this seems wholly inconsistent. Is the identity of someone behind an IP address only questionable when we don't like the outcome?
This is a bad precedent to set. Considering that Wikipedia is meant to be edited by anyone, even it is is wrong (Sarah Palin fanatics editing Paul Revere's page). The changes are supposed to be reviewed and amended if they are wrong, like in the care of Paul Revere, sorry Palin fans. Also I don't see how this caused the company any loss. I mean someone shopping for a micro payment system is not going to be looking on Wikipedia on which company to choose and if that is how a company is doing business they probably won't be doing it for long.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Hi-Media and Rentabiliweb both are micropaiement businesses (micropaiement probably being the French word for micropayment). Hi-Media went on to Wikipedia and, under the list of companies on the micropaiement article, removed Rentabiliweb's entry. Rentabiliweb could have just edited the article, and restored their entry, but instead they sued and somehow won â25,000.
But then they would have violated the conflict of interest policy of Wikipedia.
Fandroids hate facts.
Yes, a chilling effect on company shills from using public resources to help their business and hurt their competitors. In the end, no big loss.
No, this is about a shill from one company trying to edit Wikipedia to remove references to their competitor. It has nothing to do with your strawman.
You're confused between real-life (interfering with another business's trade- for which Hi-Media was fined) and a childish fantasy land where is ok to do anything you like (where you "I can't see how Hi-Media did anything wrong enough to justify such a huge fine" which you think "a warning [or] a ban").
Welcome to the grown-up's world, where your actions have consequences, whether your like it or not.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Where's the option to mod up for "Right On"?
I think that was part of the intent of the judgement. French court succeed?
Actually, threatening any legal action against anyone is grounds for an IP ban from all wikimedia projects. It's one of the few cross-project rules.
That would just likely start an edit-war. The action they took ends the problem. And gets them a little "relief" for the hassle and harm done, and a hand-slap on the bad guys to not try it again.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Lies. The articles are never gone. They are still taking up space in the database, and can be recovered by admins.
Anti-competitive, or competitive? Anybody can edit anyone out of Wikipedia, and then anyone can edit anyone back in. That makes it merely competitive. If wikipedia employees/metas actually blacklisted references to someone out of Wikipedia, that might be anti-competitive, since nobody else can undo that.
Why else would someone from their work computer be editing Wikipedia to remove names of competitors for anything but malicious reasoning? Oh, the poor shill got caught! Oh the humanity!!!
If you are removing publicly available (and seemingly correct) information about a competitor from a publicly available website, this can be easily be considered anticompetitive behaviour.
I smell a whole new breed of internet troll awakening.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Wikipedia is much better now that people have actually started trying to enforce some notability
Let's see: English Wikipedia defines notability of a subject as coverage of the subject in multiple reliable sources independent of a subject. Yet there's no remotely rigorous definition of "multiple", "reliable", or "independent". This makes notability on English Wikipedia look like "a farce", as gottabeme put it. Has French Wikipedia defined notability more objectively than English Wikipedia has?
How can you claim losses for being removed from an article on Wikipedia?
It's not an advertising platform, and the way the company was even in the article to begin with may have been inappropriate, regardless of who it was who removed it.
The fundamental question to me is what right do you have to be in a Wikipedia article? Let's assume for a moment that WP was not a publically editable site, but that it was a closed system with designated editors. Would Wikipedia be obligated to include every possible company that might be related to a particular product or service in their encyclopedia? Should they be sued for excluding some company?
If not, then why is it illegal for an editor to remove a company from a Wikipedia page? Why does it matter that it's publically editable?
The court, apparently finds it anti-competitive, but by what right does any company have to be listed in Wikipedia? Are they paying for advertising? Do they have a contract?
Now, the governing board or whatever of Wikipedia, internally, might find it to be a violation of site policy for a company to remove a competitor from Wikipedia, but why should courts be involved in what is essentially an internal governance/editorial issue at Wikipedia?
The information that was removed might have been a spam link.
It's not the purpose of Wikipedia to promote businesses.
A Wikipedia page does not owe you free advertising.
If I find that my competitor is abusing Wikipedia to boost their search engine ranking, of course I will remove it.
It could of [have] been a profe[...], but no[need a comma here] they let deletionists [...] inclusionist wikis out there[need a comma here] but as long as Wikipedia keeps [...]
If you are a Wikipedian reading this, please turn of[f] your computer and go outside. [...]
Edited that for ya.
WALSTIB!
I didn't know companies had a right to be mentioned on wikipedia. Now it is enforced by the government?
I think it's more likely a right to not have content arbitrarily deleted by a competitor. Imagine the uproar there would be if a Microsoft employee removed all references to Apple Computer from Wikipedia.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. --Aldous Huxley
The GP is right though. The fact it's on wikipedia should never change the intended harm of the action.
If you are working for company A it is anti-competitive for you to tear down posters for company B. This is just as well. The fact is is happening on Wikipedia makes no difference.
Company A in this case would rather censor the competitor than compete fairly. I think people should avoid business with the anti-competitive company because it's dishonest. If they are willing to do this, why wouldn't they pull something similar on you? A micropayment service sounds like a perfect model for ripping off merchants and end users.
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Do you really want a web where companies and individuals are actively censoring one another for personal gain? It's starting to happen already.
Imagine the day you cannot find any negative reviews for any product or company.
Your negative or critical comments are removed from a blog because they are against the sponsors.
Your posts on a forum are modified to remove links to the competitors of the recommendations you wrote.
Welcome to shillnet. Honesty and personal integrity be dammed. If you don't stop this while it is obvious, it won't send out the warning signal that society does not tolerate low and pathetic business practices. Maybe that will force people to think twice about being assholes.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Doesn't Wikipedia have their own policy for challenging such an edit (e.g. maybe not re-adding your company, but petitioning the Wikipedia editors to re-add you, and lock the page so that the competitor cannot remove you, or banning edits from the competitor's IP block or something)?
I'm not a wikipedia expert, but I know pages can be locked/protected from edits if they are big targets for vandalism (Obama most recently I think) but they're unlikely to lock it for such a small target. And no, they can't lock it against edits from a specific company. Besides, they could just go home and edit it from home etc.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I didn't know companies had a right to be mentioned on wikipedia.
Never said they had a right to be on Wikipedia. On the other hand, Wikipedia is not for company shills to be using for the advancement of their company above others.
Now it is enforced by the government?
No. Once again, constructing a strawman. This was not the government stepping in completely on their own attempting to police Wikipedia. This was a civil suit involving one company disliking the practice of the shills from another company trying to game Wikipedia to gain competitive advancement at their expense.
Wikimedia is not the company that was wronged.
Company A actively tried to hurt B by denying readers who happened upon that article at the time the mention of that company. They had a malicious motivation to stop the company's name from being heard.
If you allow this to happen, the act of hurting competitors becomes a slippery slope:
- supressing information about them
- spreading FUD about them
- physically damaging, 'removing' or intimidation them
A business ecosystem that works on these ethics is not a pleasant one (Goldman Sachs).
The author who wrote the article was probably not associated with either company, hence why both companies were mentioned. It would not have been anti-competitive if one of the companies edited the article to add their own name (it would have been against Wikipedia's neutral policy however).
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Yes, a chilling effect on company shills from using public resources to help their business and hurt their competitors. In the end, no big loss.
Uh, no. The term "chilling effect" refers to self-censorship of speech beyond the parameters of the original case for fear that those parameters will be extended to cover additional speech.
For example, the chilling effect in this case could apply to competitors (who are frequently domain experts) who simply correct information rather than delete it. One man's correction can be be another man's censorship and if that second man is particularly litigious then the truth doesn't really matter because simply defending oneself in court is frequently too much of a burden on its own.
Personally, I think the correct action in this case would have been to revert the edit and be done with it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I agree, take them out back and plunge bladed instruments into the execs who set this in motion.
You assume the edits were malicious, and they weren't actually removing a relatively unknown non-notable Micropayments company from a list of 'notable micropayment companies'
That's essentially what judges are for. They look at the case, and see if the truth can be established (beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal cases, lower standards apply in civil cases) - sometimes that's not possible, sometimes it's rather clear. Here a company removes a link to a direct competitor. Why did they do it? Because the employee of that company cares that the list of notable micropayment companies is correct, they say? Well then let him explain what criteria he used, whether he compared market presence, whether he removed other companies, whether he added competitors.
There is no absolute proof required. In this case the employee in question does not even have a Wikipedia account (since he signed with IP address), so his claim to care about the correctness of Wikipedia information would not pass the reasonable doubt standard. It would even fail the "not laughable" standard.
Many countries have laws against anticompetitive behavior. One of the scenarios this is supposed to avoid, is a larger company suppressing information or spreading misinformation about the smaller company. E.g. in the case of Wikipedia the larger company might be able to afford a dedicated person to remove the smaller companies entries, whereas the smaller company might at best be able to occasionally look at the relevant pages. They'd have no chance to keep the information correct.
What information that Wikipedia page lists afterwards is irrelevant for the court case. The company was fined for engaging in anticompetitive behavior - the judge did *not* order Wikipedia to list the competitor. So Wikipedia is still free to decide which company should be on the list and which should not.
Agreed, this should have been dealt with by Wikipedia admins.
I had a Wiki link for a music synthesis app (shareware) that was removed. I assumed Wiki had changed policy re linking to anything remotely commercial. So, why should someone get a commercial link/free advertising from Wiki anyway?
Wikipedia. The encyclopedia anyone can edit. Except when you can't. Yet again proving that silly slogans have little to do with reality.
The issue isn't what was done, it was who did it.
If you or I had removed a company from this list nothing much would have happened aside the usual 60 page argument about the Wikipedia notoriety standards which happens whenever any controversial edit occurs on Wikipedia. Someone probably would have edited it back eventually and a very interesting flame war could have been started, but no one would have been sued and if they had it would have been laughed out of court.
The issue in this case is about anti-competitive behavior and probably to a lesser extent false advertising and it exists because an agent of a competitor was the person doing the edit. I personally can claim that the product from company X is a steaming pile of crap which doesn't work with no proof whatsoever, but competitor Y cannot. In the same way I can claim that company X doesn't offer service Z, but competitor Y cannot. In a very real sense the defendant in this case is making a claim they know to be false about a competitor, which is grounds for a lawsuit in most countries.
Wikipedia's policy on external links is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links
But with over 3 million articles there will always be a few that have been missed.
It will be more than just a chilling effect. It may be the beginning of the end of wikipedia. This is opening a Pandora's Box.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I didn't know companies had a right to be mentioned on wikipedia.
Never said they had a right to be on Wikipedia. On the other hand, Wikipedia is not for company shills to be using for the advancement of their company above others.
You're absolutely right, and that's why I think it was the Wikimedia foundation who has a claim to have been wronged, and not the plaintiff of this lawsuit.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Wikimedia neglected to file a claim or hire a lawyer in this dispute. I suspect Wiki and Co. did not want any publicity brought to anyone finding legal redress outside of its own oversight procedures.
If voting could change the system, it would be illegal. - God used to be my co-pilot, then we crashed into a mountain