Company Fined €25,000 For Altering Wikipedia 141
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."
Horribly Summary (Score:3)
Re:Horribly Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Horribly Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Horribly Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Were they forced to make 5 million payments of 0.005 euros each?
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Cool, thanks for that, now I do not have to waste time RTFA, on the downside, this happens all the time, and yet no one seems to think to prove anything in court in the US and Canada for it, as there is no such legislation for wiki being a "proper" source of info, I guess the Europeans know wiki to be a stable and proper source of info with no such things as garbage sitting on there...
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It's about companies that offer micropayment.
There was a list of companies that offered this service, and Hi-Media removed their competitor from that list. The competitor (Rentabiliweb) noticed this, and found out that the IP address of the edit belonged to a computer at Hi-Media, which the judge saw as proof that Hi-Media sanctioned it.
Rentabiliweb claimed 150 000 in damages, but only got 25 000, because "people don't usually visit Wikipedia to find companies that offer services"
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No it isn't.
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The link goes to a google translation of the article, so I'm guessing the summary was "translated" from the original as well.
I agree, it's completely unintelligible. I only get that one company is suing another over a Wikipedia edit. I think that the defendant company removed the plaintiff company from a list of companies providing some service. I think all the she and her stuff must be because of gendered nouns in the original language.
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Indeed.
Good summary,
And good analysis : in French, there is no equivalent to "it" and "its", eveything has a gender ( and yes a company is "female" ). That's why "she" sued "her" competitor.
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There's always "ce", as in "c'est la vie". Ce is usually used for "this" or "that", but can also be translated as "it". Much like English, there's a real problem with specifying unknown or indeterminate gender. For some reason, Anglophones really hate using "it" to refer to people, thus you end up with "he/she needs to eat his/her food", instead of "it needs to eat its food". At least, in English, when gender is inapplicable (a situation that English recognizes), you can use "it".
Re:Horribly Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
Anglophones really hate using "it" to refer to people, thus you end up with "he/she needs to eat his/her food", instead of "it needs to eat its food"
Most Americans use "they" instead of he/she, since he-she is sometimes used to refer to a transvestite. It's odd when you stop to think about using a plural for a singular pronoun of indeterminant gender, but it's better than it or he/she.
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From my dictionary:
The word they as a singular pronoun to refer to a person of unspecified sex has been used since at least the 16th century. In the late 20th century, as the traditional use of he to refer to a person of either sex came under scrutiny on the grounds of sexism, this use of they has become more common. It is now generally accepted in contexts where it follows an indefinite pronoun such as anyone, no one, someone, or a person.
In other contexts, coming after singular nouns, the use of they is now common, although less widely accepted, esp. in formal contexts. Sentences such as : ask a friend if they could help are still criticized for being ungrammatical. Nevertheless, in view of the growing acceptance of they and its obvious practical advantages, they is used in this dictionary in many cases where he would have been used formerly.
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http://xkcd.com/145/ [xkcd.com]
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Are you kidding? I'm sure they'd rather be called "crewman" than "it".
seamen is still ok...
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It's comparably insulting to calling someone in the Navy "crewman" rather than by their rank or appropriate honorific.
Brilliant. Explain a basic feature of the English language by using analogy to an obscure factoid about English-language naval etiquette that you can be 99% sure any native speaker would be ignorant of, let alone someone unfamiliar with basic English.
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"It" sounds like you're referring to a thing, not a person.
Yes but when that person is a company it's terribly confusing to refer to it as 'she.'
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I think all the she and her stuff must be because of gendered nouns in the original language.
In English, all nouns are transgender.
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In English, all nouns are transgender.
girl? boy? Cederic?
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Hi-Media and Rentabiliweb both are micropaiement businesses (micropaiement probably being the French word for micropayment). Hi-Media went on to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] 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 me
Re:What???? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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Agreed, this should have been dealt with by Wikipedia admins.
But do you have a right to be in a WP article? (Score:3)
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 t
Re:But do you have a right to be in a WP article? (Score:5, Insightful)
Has nothing to do with Wikipedia per se. That's not the fundamental issue.
Someone censored or supressed what was or is for selfish gain. It's wrong.
That's the anti-competitive act.
It's like me hiding your painting in a gallery so people buy mine rather than yours.
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It was done on a publicly accessible site that explicitly invites editing, though. If the gallery were in a public park, with a sign on the front that explicitly said "all visitors are free to rearrange the paintings", should it still be illegal if I move your painting to hide it?
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Let's make up a nice hypothetical situation for you. You are company A and I am company B and we operate in the same industry.
You did whatever you did to earn a high ranking on Google's indexes. I somehow managed to have all mention of your company removed from Google's indexes so that only my company appears there.
So let's ask your irrelevant question about "what right" exists to be listed there at all. I think in the case of appearance on Google and the removal of it is a demonstrable case of harm as i
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Your hypothetical situation doesn't seem to prove what you want it to, in my opinion.
Who shows up where in Google's Indexes is solely Google's business. The only right I might have to be on Google is whatever right Google *grants* to me.
If Google sells my competitor the right to remove me from Google's search results, then I might have a lawsuit against Google (if I had a contract with Google to be listed; of course, if I don't pay for my google listing, but just expect to show up because of the crawler giv
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Actually, it does and you are missing a huge point that has been demonstrated right here on slashdot multiple times. First of all, while you seem to think Google is at 100% liberty to do what it wants with its own servers and services, you are demonstrably wrong by legal precedent. Google is severely limited by what it can and cannot do by virtue of competition laws, trademark laws, copyright laws and more. The controversy over Google Ad Words is precedent enough to show that.
And barring any interference
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Hi-Media and Rentabiliweb both are micropaiement businesses (micropaiement probably being the French word for micropayment). Hi-Media went on to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] 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.
You're confused. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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I agree that what Hi-Media did is wrong and unethical, but I fail to see how anything they did should be illegal or otherwise worthy of any sort of lawsuit. Sure, you can sue for anything, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be summarily thrown out of court by a judge for wasting their time.
Consider Hi-Media and this other company are both members in some private club, which has a building with publicly facing windows. As part of this club, you can hang anything you want out the windows, or remove anything
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... I fail to see how anything they did should be illegal or otherwise worthy of any sort of lawsuit.
Please do a little reading on civil vs. criminal law. Civil cases deal with liability, not with criminality. You are right, there is nothing illegal about changing content on wikipedia. But it is very possible to damage someone monetarily, reputation wise, etc. by what you add or remove to wikipedia, and you would be liable for those damages should you do said edit. And that is why this was a civil case, not a criminal case.
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This is a ridiculous idea. In the sense that hearing this will encourage similar lawsuits, it's a bad precedent. What goes on in a system like Wikipedia is a matter for site policy, not law. What's next? Suing someone because their thief-character stole some in-game item from you?
The public has no reasonable expectation that what they read is right. Companies often leave their strongest competitors off any lists they make of the competition. Nobody has a right to read only right things. So making a website
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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.
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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)?
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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.
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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 whi
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Wikipedia admins beware (Score:3, Funny)
Now we can sue you for recommending our pages for speedy deletion. Take that!
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If this sort of lawsuit becomes the norm, we can *definitely* expect a chilling effect.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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 polic
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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!!!
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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 e
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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
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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-comp
So Wikipedia is a marketing website now? (Score:2)
Since when is Wikipedia an appropriate place to advertise?
Re:So Wikipedia is a marketing website now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since when is Wikipedia an appropriate place to advertise?
Since Jimbo needed money?
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I habitually look for service providers on Wikipedia
Attempted summary (Score:4, Informative)
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. :)
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Moreover, Company A = Hi-Média, and Company B = Rentabiliweb.
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I dropped out of this conversation on account of AC being insane. He/she would frequently burst into rants about his/her high school French teacher being insane.
When will people learn (Score:2)
WP:ELNO-no (Score:2)
TFA has an image of the Wikipedia edit. I found it [wikipedia.org], 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 [wikipedia.org]". And in fact, the current article has only a list of internal links.
Identified by IP (Score:1)
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here is the difference
The Company purchased Internet access (and a fixed block of ip addresses)
The edit was done from an ip address in said FIXED BLOCK of addresses
Therefore the COMPANY was held liable
Its the difference in the real world of a business getting held responsible for a letterbomb sent by courier from a street address
and
a person being held responsible for a letterbomb sent from a motel room (just because they happen to have been registered at that room)
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If their company is anything like the one that I work for, they own their IP address. If the company is being sued for 25k Euros, it would seem to be valid if it's based on the fact that an edit came from an IP that the company owns. They can'
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Poor precedent (Score:2)
25,000 Euros in losses? (Score:2)
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.
Stupid french court (Score:3)
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.
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ANd would you still do that if (as in this case) you had a link on thier advertising your shit?
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And you would be violating Wikipedia guidelines. The French version [wikipedia.org] is sorely lacking, but as a translation from the English version [wikipedia.org] has been requested, you can read up over there, but for some quick summaries:
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It's okay for you to advertise but not me? :/
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Which this company could have done, had they simultaneously removed their own abuse of Wikipedia to boost their own search engine ranking.
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Well yes, but this is about the original company removing the link. Had they removed the links to their own website as well as their competitors they could have cited wikipedia guidelines as justification for their removal and not gotten sued. Removing their competitor's only got them in trouble.
But my perfectly well-intentioned link was removed (Score:1)
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Wikipedia's policy on external links is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links [wikipedia.org]
But with over 3 million articles there will always be a few that have been missed.
Ah Wikipedia. (Score:2)
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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.
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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 [wikipedia.org] employee removed all references to Apple Computer [wikipedia.org] from Wikipedia.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re:Wikipedia had its bla bla EDITED (Score:2)
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.
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On en.wp, notability is a farce (Score:2)
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 [slashdot.org]. Has French Wikipedia defined notability more objectively than English Wikipedia has?