UK Judge Orders Wikipedia To Reveal User's Identity 260
BoxRec writes with this excerpt from The Daily Mail: "A mother trying to identify a blackmailer who posted 'sensitive' details about her child on Wikipedia has won the right to find out who edited her entry. In the first case of its kind, a High Court judge has ordered the online encyclopedia's parent company to disclose the IP address of one of its registered users."
Mental harm != non gratis (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Jurisdiction? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Streisand effect? (Score:3, Interesting)
And we should be able to see the actual edit itself in the history, unless that gets tampered with...
Which is very easy to do. MediaWiki (the wiki software Wikipedia runs) has a feature that allows privileged users to hide the contents of edits from a page's history.
Re:Streisand effect? (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly a case of the consolidated media industry fighting off new technology startup that could shine a light on all their misdeeds
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know a lot of people don't RTFA, but is it to much to ask that you at least read the Slashdot summary?
Re:it's not whistleblowing, its blackmail (Score:5, Interesting)
Blackmail is a crime because if blackmail were not a crime people would be more likely to engage in self-help to rid themselves of the blackmailer. Such self-help could manifest itself in socially destructive ways.
Blackmail is just a variant of extortion, anyway. Surely nobody would doubt that protection rackets are rightfully criminal. Threatening to hurt somebody financially if money is not paid is only a matter of degree less awful than threatening to kick somebody's ass in exchange for money.
Blackmail also is a good way to extort people into doing very undesirable things (like espionage, embezzlement, corrupt political behavior, for example).
Extortion is one more example why free speech must be limited. Words can hurt!
Only a screwed-up unworkable society could ever have unrestrained free speech. One of the best measures of a free society is the care taken to draw equitable lines between unpermitted speech and free speech.
Re:Jurisdiction? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's always been the case that Wikimedia could reveal an IP address - just as Slashdot, or any other site could. When people leave comments on my blog, I get the IP addresses - if they annoyed me, or maybe for no reason at all, I could make their IP addresses public. No need for a court order.
I don't think it follows that just because Wikimedia reveals it in the case of a UK court order, for blackmail (something that is illegal in the US too, and is reasonably seen as illegal and unethical), not to mention vandalising Wikipedia, that they would also do so in the case of China for doing something that was entirely legal in the US, and where the edit was entirely reasonable.
Just because someone is not required by law to do something, doesn't mean they can't decide to do it anyway. Remember we're talking about someone vandalising the site - if I trolled some website, I could hardly go pleading sympathy if they revealed my IP address, whether or not a court was involved.
Re:What about judges in other countries? (Score:2, Interesting)
The WMF would be free to ignore such a ruling. Indeed it is free to ignore this one however has chosen not to because it thinks the court order is reasonable based on the facts they have available and the English courts do have a passing relationship with sanity (well some of the time anyway).
Re:Mental harm != non gratis (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually it IS because it causes social harm. You already have a right to be offended, you do not have the right to demand someone else pay for YOUR sensitivities (thank you Larry Flynt [wikipedia.org]).
Re:Jurisdiction? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why I love Wikileaks, at least so far. They actually protect their sources. And they do seem to show some discretion about what they publish, which helps prevent blackmail abuse. I was vastly amused when they published various manuals on operations at Guantanamo Bay.
Re:Tor (Score:2, Interesting)
That's only for non-logged-in editing.
Re:Tor (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually ALL of the TOR exit nodes are known. It is a known flaw of the TOR network.
Re:remedial intellectual charity: (Score:4, Interesting)
Forgive me because I'm not even an american citizen but it seems that this is an inflated example. If you shout "fire" in your own home, that is not a criminal act. If you shout it in the middle of the town square that is not a criminal act. If you shout it in a crowded theatre that is not a criminal act. (you could do it on stage, as part of the show). If you shout it in the middle of the audience it is not strictly a criminal act either - it could be that you are at a show with audience participation and two clowns are on stage with blunderbusses asking what to do. What would be criminal about such actions is that little thing "Incitement to Riot" and that is not related to the contents or location of your speech, but has everything to do with your intention to cause a riot.
In a similar vein, pushing an electrical switch is not a criminal act. Millions of people do it all the time, but perhaps pushing a switch that you know will cause a riot (eg, set off the fire alarm in a crowded theatre) is criminal because of that same reason "Incitement to Riot" and no restrictions need be placed on your button pushing abilities to prosecute you for it.
Of course, as a non-american I don't know if "Incitement to Riot" is actually a prosecutable offence. It is fairly obvious that it is no good reason to riot, and neither is it a good excuse. I don't know, in a theatre riot situation, if the person who pushes another to their death over the balcony in a blind panic is excused in favour of the person who started rioting, or the person who incited the riot. For a car analogy, if there was a situation where several cars were driving slowly or stopped but one ploughed into the back at high speed, causing a bump forward effect that damaged all the cars and the guy at the front was unlucky enough to get whiplash injuries, who is liable for them? The guy behind who had no control, the guy at the back who didn't put on his hazard warning lights or the guy who was driving too fast while not paying attention?
Re:Tor (Score:3, Interesting)
Slashdot started not letting me post for a while because I ran a Tor node. It took a couple E-mails back and forth after I'd shut it down to be able to post on Slashdot again.