Judge: Wikipedia is immune from defamation lawsuits

Jordan Golson — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:01:10 -0700

A New Jersey judge has dismissed a defamation lawsuit against Jimmy Wales's Wikimedia Foundation, owner of Wikipedia.

The case centered around statements made about literary agent Barbara Bauer which called her one of the "dumbest of the twenty worst" agents and claimed she had "no documented sales at all."

The Electronic Freedom Foundation assisted with the defense of Wikimedia and successfully argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protected Wikimedia from liability of its users' comments because it is an operator of an "interactive computer service."

It's unclear why lawyers continue to file defamation lawsuits against big companies over user comments when they, nearly without fail, all get tossed out. Oh, wait, I know: they want the payday.

More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:

Special Feature: The iPhone naysayers, one year later
Special Feature: IT vs. initiative: The Internet age comes to the battlefield
Special Feature: The Digital Home of 2013: 10 consumer technologies that will succeed, and five that will fail
Special Feature: Whe re are they now? The Industry Standard tracks down 10 dot-coms from the Web bubble of the late 1990s