> The Wikimedia Foundation has suspended access to this page due to an order by the Delhi High Court, without prejudice to the Foundation's rights. We are pursuing all available legal options.
> We remain committed to access to knowledge as a human right. We are working to ensure that everyone can access and share free knowledge on Wikipedia.
> This regards active litigation, and this page will be updated when we are able to share more information.
> ANI Media Private Limited, the parent company of news agency Asian News International (ANI), filed a ₹2 crore (approximately US$240,000) defamation suit against the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) over the description of ANI in the English Wikipedia article about the news agency.
Asian News International used the Delhi High Court to censor Wikipedia? Or did the court order the censorship ex officio?
> The prior page has been scrubbed from the history of the page, which I have never seen before.
Its rare, but does happen ocassionally. Normally it only happens when someone posts personal information that is not something that is in the public interest enough to belong in an article.
Those deletions seem consistent with Wikipedia norms and come from within the organization and its editors, compared to this action being seemingly complied with under protest in order to leave all options open legally.
Indeed, i agree. I just meant on a technical level, scrubbing page histories is a thing that happens ocassionally. The current situatuon is pretty unprecedented as far as i know.
It's weird that wikipedia took down the page for all users, rather than only for Indian users. AFAIK most tech companies only comply with "political" takedown requests (I'm using this broadly to include anything between blasphemy/lese majeste laws and defamation/right to be forgotten laws, as opposed to something like DMCA requests) in the country where the takedown was issued, leaving it up for other countries. Does the wikimedia foundation not have the infrastructure to do geo-targeted takedowns? Or was this the intended outcome?
But how can a court have worldwide jurisdiction? I suppose it was technically harder to handle this request just for Indian users, since it was an unprecedented request.
I don't believe it does, but the courts threatened to block Wikipedia or find WMF and likely any assets and/or staff in India in contempt if they did not comply, likely including fines.
It seems like an explicitly political takedown request to me, based on what I have read and what others who study such things also say. Can you find some sources that share your view, or can you elaborate why you think that this is not a case of censorship and extraterritorial overreach by the Indian court?
> The takedown follows an order by the Delhi High Court, where Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela ruled that the Wikipedia page describing criticism of the lawsuit “amounts to interference in Court proceedings,” and that this violated the “subjudice principle”.
In case you're not familiar with the subjudice principle:
> This legal concept essentially means that cases being considered in a current trial should not be prejudiced by public discussion. It aims to avoid biasing or influencing the judicial process while the matter remains undetermined by a judge or jury.
Basically the article in question is about a current court case in which Wikimedia is the defendant. The court has ruled that neither party should be making public statements about the case until a judgement is made. This is very standard practice and happens in all jurisdictions. The article on Wikipedia, hosted by the Wikimedia foundation itself, would be such a statement.
Wikimedia is not being asked to censor an article for political purposes. It is asked merely to refrain from making statements about an ongoing court case in which Wikipedia itself is a defendant, in standard accordance with the subjudice principle.
WMF isn't making statements; WMF is being forced to censor free speech of independent Wikipedia editors on behalf of a court that doesn't even have jurisdiction over editors outside India, to my reading.
Legally speaking, the entire contents of Wikipedia is Wikimedia Foundation's mouthpiece, regardless of how the editing works. And the legality is what matters here, since we're talking about a court of law.
In what legal jurisdiction are you making such claims? This is not consistent with my understanding of US copyright law, which is what would apply in my reading.
> The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation.
> The Wikimedia Foundation that supports Wikipedia is located in California and the servers that host Wikipedia are located in Virginia, so Wikipedia is bound to comply with United States copyright law.
This isn't about copyright law. Who is responsible for content served on the internet? In pretty much all jurisdictions I'm aware of, it defaults to the one hosting the content. In this case, the Wikimedia foundation.
In the case of US law, Section 230 exempts Wikimedia Foundation from being responsible for the content of Wikipedia, which is probably the basis for your intuition, but there is not to my knowledge any analogue to Section 230 in Indian law.
To the degree that servers are not present in India, and WMF/Wikipedia assets are not hosted in India, I don't find that Indian courts have any means to assert their rulings over Wikipedia or WMF outside Indian IP space, to my understanding.
Wikipedia just doesn't want to be blackholed in India until legal avenues are explored, so they complied with a too-broad ruling, in my opinion.
> The Safe Harbor clause of Information and Technology Act, 2000, comparable to Section 230 of Communications Act of 1934 in the United States, exempts online platforms from any legal liability for third-party content generated by its users and hosted by the platform, subject to several conditions. In February 2021, the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party government introduced amendments to the IT Act, imposing stricter obligations on intermediaries, including requiring them to proactively monitor content for illegal or harmful activity.
Indian law only applies within India, and apparently is being unequally applied, as even India news articles about this legal case are not themselves subject to the rulings. This is selective enforcement, and isn't going to work, as the page is still available by other means, so the ruling is literally unenforceable outside India and likely also within India.
Are those news publishers named in this lawsuit? No? Then why should a subjudice gag apply to them?
I've been generous in trying to engage with you in this thread, but it is hard now to not assume malintent. It's been pointed out repeatedly that this court order has nothing to do with copyright law, nothing to do with the political censorship the court cases are about, and nothing at all to do with external publishers.
This is a defendant in a case being prevented from speaking about the case until the judgement of the court, as is absolutely standard practice in all commonwealth countries.
Assuming bad faith is against HN Guidelines. Please don't do that.
The editors that created the page in question are not defendants in the case, and they are the ones being censored, and Wikipedia and WMF by proxy.
Even if the Indian gag order were valid within India, which remains to be tried in court, such a ruling could not possibly apply worldwide, as India could not effectively enforce such an order outside Indian networks.
This type of gag order applied against Wikipedia has never happened before, nor been complied with pending trial, so no, I would not agree that this is standard practice within the Commonwealth or without.
The reason sites generally comply with copyright takedowns worldwide is that most relevant countries have copyright laws and it's often more expedient to execute the takedowns everywhere than to hire lawyers to figure out where they have to do it and where they don't. In particular, that isn't a court in India ordering Wikipedia to do something in the US, it's Wikipedia in the US assuming that the US would require them to do the same thing and getting ahead of it.
Suppressing discussion of active court cases isn't commonly agreed upon. For example, in the US prohibiting it would have obvious First Amendment problems. So a court in India ordering Wikipedia to do that in the US is a big deal.
> "political" takedown requests (I'm using this broadly to include anything between blasphemy/lese majeste laws and defamation/right to be forgotten laws, as opposed to something like DMCA requests)
In US courts, the truth is a defense against defamation. I don't see that defamation is explicitly what is claimed in this case, but the gag order seems motivated to silence those individuals (editors) and groups (Wikipedia and WMF) not in Indian jurisdiction for purposes of suppressing legitimate discussion and dissent of a court case that is relevant to the public. This can only create a chilling effect, suppressing exercise of free speech rights of all individual editors and freedom to read of all.
Wouldn't this principle apply to all news, blogs and social media posts? Why would a website operated by a defendant with content from 3rd parties be any different?
Also, is the principle of subjudice applied in countries without jurors?
This is going to be quite the controversial case, whether a platform is responsible for surfacing information published by other sources. In this ongoing suit, ANI is going after editors of Wikipedia for defamation instead of the original authors. What today applies to Wikipedia, may tomorrow apply to social media platforms where users can be charged for simply sharing links.
According to Jimbo Wales, they complied in order to not "lose the possibility to appeal". Apparently, "the short term legal requirements in order to not wreck the long term chance of victory made this a necessary step." WMF lawyers are doing "everything [they] can to win this battle for the long run, as opposed to petulantly refusing to do something today."
I actually had some hopes that this particular court would make the first win for Sci-hub against publishers. But it seems this is very optimistic (not to mention dragging for years now).
This is headline bait. The article in question is about a lawsuit in which Wikipedia is the defendant. The court said that they needed to take down the article just until the lawsuit is resolved, to prevent jury tampering.
> The case was filed in July 2024 before Justice Navin Chawla in the Delhi High Court as ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v Wikimedia Foundation Inc & Ors. At the time of the suit's filing, the Wikipedia article about Asian News International (ANI) said the news agency had "been accused of having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on multiple occasions".
> The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing "false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency's reputation, and aimed to discredit its goodwill". It also complained that Wikipedia had "closed" the article about ANI for editing except by Wikipedia's "own editors", citing this as evidence of defamation with malicious intent and evidence that WMF was using its "officials" to "actively participate" in controlling content.
> According to Newslaundry, the sentence ANI objects to has "clear citations that lead to the primary source of information", including to The Caravan, The Ken, BBC News, EU DisinfoLab, Politico, and The Diplomat. Newslaundry and journalist Nikhil Pahwa pointed out that none of the media organizations used as sources were included in ANI's complaint. According to The Indian Express, the lawsuit is an attempt to hold WMF liable for edits to Wikipedia.
> Software Freedom Law Center, India, a member-affiliate of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, found the suit to be an attempt at stifling free speech. Nishant Shah, professor of Global Media at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, wrote that Chawla's decision to order the release of personally-identifying information was "a challenge to freedom of speech and information" and would result in the censorship of "any form of critical information that powerful organisations do not like". Pahwa called it censorship that threatened to "stifle the flow of information and knowledge". Multiple lawyers have critiqued Manomhan and Gedela's order to take down the page on the litigation, too, disagreeing with the allegations of interfering with judicial proceedings and noting similar coverage by mainstream media.
> Tanveer Hasan, director of the Centre for Internet and Society, called the proceedings an "assault on the freedom of speech under the guise of technological regulation".
It is very standard in many jurisdictions for courts to prevent either party from making public statements on a case until it is resolved. That is what is going on here.
I don't find this argument compelling in this case, because news agencies cited by the Wikipedia article in question were not themselves subject to similar or the same lawsuit.
If you are subject to a lawsuit and the judge issues a gag order restricting you (and the party suing you) from making public statements about the court case until it is resolved, that wouldn't be weird no?
If that were to happen, and you were to then publish an article about this exact court case on your blog, you'd be found in contempt of court and rightly so. Even if the blog article only summarizes and links to other content, like the news articles. You were restricted from speaking about the case, and you broke that restriction. What part of "don't make public statements about this case" didn't you understand?
That's what's going on here. Wikipedia is, essentially, Wikimedia Foundation's blog. This article about the court case is, legally speaking, Wikimedia speaking about an ongoing case they are involved with. If the court issues a gag order, they have to respect it. This is subjudice, not censorship.
Wikimedia Foundation is not the author of Wikipedia - individual editors are. WMF isn't making any statements - editors are when they write articles. It's censoring speech of editors not subject to the jurisdiction of the court, and threatening legal penalties against the English language Wikipedia.
The fact that this hasn't happened before should tell everyone that this is not business as usual. No other government in the world has caused WMF to respond in such a way, which leads me to believe that this case is not as obvious as you say.
Also, due to license terms of Wikipedia, by deleting the page, individually and collectively, Wikipedia editors are being denied their rights as authors. This may be a copyright violation in India, in the jurisdiction of the editors, in the legal jurisdiction in which WMF/Wikipedia are incorporated in, and/or all of the above, that is to say, worldwide.
That's not how legal responsibility is assigned in nearly all jurisdictions. It doesn't matter who wrote some speech. It matters who _hosted_ the speech. I'm not a solicitor in India so I can't say for certain how things are handled here, but this is not surprising for any commonwealth jurisdiction.
According to Jimbo Wales, they complied in order to not "lose the possibility to appeal". Apparently, "the short term legal requirements in order to not wreck the long term chance of victory made this a necessary step." WMF lawyers are doing "everything [they] can to win this battle for the long run, as opposed to petulantly refusing to do something today."
I disagree with this. The buck stops with WMF. They write the rules and they are the ultimate arbiters of edit wars. They are the ones ultimately responsible for granting and taking away privileges from users.
If something is written on wikipedia it's because they are okay with it. The political slant of wikipedia is an expression of WMF views.
Also an important point is that wikipedia aims to create a work that is a coherent whole spoken with one voice rather than say hosting a discussion where writing is clearly attributed to its respective authors.
Wikipedia endeavors to have neutral point of view, and there are nearly 900 “admin” editors. This is not an easy consensus, and I’m not sure that such sweeping statements applied collectively to MWF or Wikipedia are expressing to me what you might seek to convey.
https://archive.is/POAuW
The page in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International_vs._W...
> The Wikimedia Foundation has suspended access to this page due to an order by the Delhi High Court, without prejudice to the Foundation's rights. We are pursuing all available legal options.
> We remain committed to access to knowledge as a human right. We are working to ensure that everyone can access and share free knowledge on Wikipedia.
> This regards active litigation, and this page will be updated when we are able to share more information.
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:October_16_2024_A...
The prior page has been scrubbed from the history of the page, which I have never seen before.
Most recent archive of page I could find:
https://archive.is/dNTEl
Court case info says "pending" with next court date being listed as October 25, 2024:
https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/court/dhc_case_status_list_new...
https://archive.is/yPgzv
> ANI Media Private Limited, the parent company of news agency Asian News International (ANI), filed a ₹2 crore (approximately US$240,000) defamation suit against the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) over the description of ANI in the English Wikipedia article about the news agency.
Asian News International used the Delhi High Court to censor Wikipedia? Or did the court order the censorship ex officio?
Unclear to me at the moment; I’m catching up on the Wikipedia Talk page that has some staff quotes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)
> The prior page has been scrubbed from the history of the page, which I have never seen before.
Its rare, but does happen ocassionally. Normally it only happens when someone posts personal information that is not something that is in the public interest enough to belong in an article.
Those deletions seem consistent with Wikipedia norms and come from within the organization and its editors, compared to this action being seemingly complied with under protest in order to leave all options open legally.
Indeed, i agree. I just meant on a technical level, scrubbing page histories is a thing that happens ocassionally. The current situatuon is pretty unprecedented as far as i know.
The only other time I found a country-level block for a specific page was this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-sur-Haute_military_radi...
Worldwide blocks for a specific page are unprecedented.
It's weird that wikipedia took down the page for all users, rather than only for Indian users. AFAIK most tech companies only comply with "political" takedown requests (I'm using this broadly to include anything between blasphemy/lese majeste laws and defamation/right to be forgotten laws, as opposed to something like DMCA requests) in the country where the takedown was issued, leaving it up for other countries. Does the wikimedia foundation not have the infrastructure to do geo-targeted takedowns? Or was this the intended outcome?
From what I've gathered, the worldwide takedown was court-ordered.
https://archive.is/dNTEl
But how can a court have worldwide jurisdiction? I suppose it was technically harder to handle this request just for Indian users, since it was an unprecedented request.
I don't believe it does, but the courts threatened to block Wikipedia or find WMF and likely any assets and/or staff in India in contempt if they did not comply, likely including fines.
This is similar to what Australia is doing to X, requesting content be taken down worldwide, which X is fighting.
I think that as of June this year, that saga has ended in favor of X:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/win-free-speech-austra...
https://archive.is/rgNKq
This isn’t a political takedown request.
It seems like an explicitly political takedown request to me, based on what I have read and what others who study such things also say. Can you find some sources that share your view, or can you elaborate why you think that this is not a case of censorship and extraterritorial overreach by the Indian court?
TFA backs me up as a source:
> The takedown follows an order by the Delhi High Court, where Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela ruled that the Wikipedia page describing criticism of the lawsuit “amounts to interference in Court proceedings,” and that this violated the “subjudice principle”.
In case you're not familiar with the subjudice principle:
> This legal concept essentially means that cases being considered in a current trial should not be prejudiced by public discussion. It aims to avoid biasing or influencing the judicial process while the matter remains undetermined by a judge or jury.
https://www.vintti.com/blog/sub-judice-legal-concept-explain....
Basically the article in question is about a current court case in which Wikimedia is the defendant. The court has ruled that neither party should be making public statements about the case until a judgement is made. This is very standard practice and happens in all jurisdictions. The article on Wikipedia, hosted by the Wikimedia foundation itself, would be such a statement.
Wikimedia is not being asked to censor an article for political purposes. It is asked merely to refrain from making statements about an ongoing court case in which Wikipedia itself is a defendant, in standard accordance with the subjudice principle.
WMF isn't making statements; WMF is being forced to censor free speech of independent Wikipedia editors on behalf of a court that doesn't even have jurisdiction over editors outside India, to my reading.
Legally speaking, the entire contents of Wikipedia is Wikimedia Foundation's mouthpiece, regardless of how the editing works. And the legality is what matters here, since we're talking about a court of law.
In what legal jurisdiction are you making such claims? This is not consistent with my understanding of US copyright law, which is what would apply in my reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
> The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-US_copyrights
> The Wikimedia Foundation that supports Wikipedia is located in California and the servers that host Wikipedia are located in Virginia, so Wikipedia is bound to comply with United States copyright law.
This isn't about copyright law. Who is responsible for content served on the internet? In pretty much all jurisdictions I'm aware of, it defaults to the one hosting the content. In this case, the Wikimedia foundation.
In the case of US law, Section 230 exempts Wikimedia Foundation from being responsible for the content of Wikipedia, which is probably the basis for your intuition, but there is not to my knowledge any analogue to Section 230 in Indian law.
To the degree that servers are not present in India, and WMF/Wikipedia assets are not hosted in India, I don't find that Indian courts have any means to assert their rulings over Wikipedia or WMF outside Indian IP space, to my understanding.
Wikipedia just doesn't want to be blackholed in India until legal avenues are explored, so they complied with a too-broad ruling, in my opinion.
The case isn't over yet.
https://archive.is/dNTEl
> The Safe Harbor clause of Information and Technology Act, 2000, comparable to Section 230 of Communications Act of 1934 in the United States, exempts online platforms from any legal liability for third-party content generated by its users and hosted by the platform, subject to several conditions. In February 2021, the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party government introduced amendments to the IT Act, imposing stricter obligations on intermediaries, including requiring them to proactively monitor content for illegal or harmful activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Act,_20...
> This is not consistent with my understanding of US copyright law, which is what would apply in my reading.
Haha, we are talking about Indian law. And US copyright law is (thanks to MPAA, RIAA and international treaties) almost universally enforced.
Indian law only applies within India, and apparently is being unequally applied, as even India news articles about this legal case are not themselves subject to the rulings. This is selective enforcement, and isn't going to work, as the page is still available by other means, so the ruling is literally unenforceable outside India and likely also within India.
Are those news publishers named in this lawsuit? No? Then why should a subjudice gag apply to them?
I've been generous in trying to engage with you in this thread, but it is hard now to not assume malintent. It's been pointed out repeatedly that this court order has nothing to do with copyright law, nothing to do with the political censorship the court cases are about, and nothing at all to do with external publishers.
This is a defendant in a case being prevented from speaking about the case until the judgement of the court, as is absolutely standard practice in all commonwealth countries.
Assuming bad faith is against HN Guidelines. Please don't do that.
The editors that created the page in question are not defendants in the case, and they are the ones being censored, and Wikipedia and WMF by proxy.
Even if the Indian gag order were valid within India, which remains to be tried in court, such a ruling could not possibly apply worldwide, as India could not effectively enforce such an order outside Indian networks.
This type of gag order applied against Wikipedia has never happened before, nor been complied with pending trial, so no, I would not agree that this is standard practice within the Commonwealth or without.
> This isn’t a political takedown request.
On the basis of that categorization it is.
The reason sites generally comply with copyright takedowns worldwide is that most relevant countries have copyright laws and it's often more expedient to execute the takedowns everywhere than to hire lawyers to figure out where they have to do it and where they don't. In particular, that isn't a court in India ordering Wikipedia to do something in the US, it's Wikipedia in the US assuming that the US would require them to do the same thing and getting ahead of it.
Suppressing discussion of active court cases isn't commonly agreed upon. For example, in the US prohibiting it would have obvious First Amendment problems. So a court in India ordering Wikipedia to do that in the US is a big deal.
For what it's worth, Wikipedia itself considers this so-called single-article dispute an explicit case of censorship:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia#India
> "political" takedown requests (I'm using this broadly to include anything between blasphemy/lese majeste laws and defamation/right to be forgotten laws, as opposed to something like DMCA requests)
Emphasis mine
None of which apply here? This is a subjudice gag order.
In US courts, the truth is a defense against defamation. I don't see that defamation is explicitly what is claimed in this case, but the gag order seems motivated to silence those individuals (editors) and groups (Wikipedia and WMF) not in Indian jurisdiction for purposes of suppressing legitimate discussion and dissent of a court case that is relevant to the public. This can only create a chilling effect, suppressing exercise of free speech rights of all individual editors and freedom to read of all.
https://archive.is/dNTEl
> The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing "false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency's reputation
Why? After reading the article it looks like the most political one to me.
Don't confuse the content of the case, which is certainly political, with the principle of subjudice underlying the court's takedown request.
Wouldn't this principle apply to all news, blogs and social media posts? Why would a website operated by a defendant with content from 3rd parties be any different?
Also, is the principle of subjudice applied in countries without jurors?
This is going to be quite the controversial case, whether a platform is responsible for surfacing information published by other sources. In this ongoing suit, ANI is going after editors of Wikipedia for defamation instead of the original authors. What today applies to Wikipedia, may tomorrow apply to social media platforms where users can be charged for simply sharing links.
> whether a platform is responsible for surfacing information published by other sources.
Welcome to EU.
According to Jimbo Wales, they complied in order to not "lose the possibility to appeal". Apparently, "the short term legal requirements in order to not wreck the long term chance of victory made this a necessary step." WMF lawyers are doing "everything [they] can to win this battle for the long run, as opposed to petulantly refusing to do something today."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#c...
I actually had some hopes that this particular court would make the first win for Sci-hub against publishers. But it seems this is very optimistic (not to mention dragging for years now).
This is headline bait. The article in question is about a lawsuit in which Wikipedia is the defendant. The court said that they needed to take down the article just until the lawsuit is resolved, to prevent jury tampering.
This is a nothing burger.
Where are you getting the "jury tampering" from? Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_trial#India seems to indicate that India mostly abolished jury trials after independence.
I inferred too much from:
> amounts to interference in Court proceedings
I disagree.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgW2Xkz21Wc
https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/09/18/explained-whats-ani-v...
https://archive.is/0lUgq
> The court has asked Wikipedia to disclose details of individuals who made edits on its ANI page.
From the last archive of the page in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International_vs._W...
https://archive.is/dNTEl
> The case was filed in July 2024 before Justice Navin Chawla in the Delhi High Court as ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v Wikimedia Foundation Inc & Ors. At the time of the suit's filing, the Wikipedia article about Asian News International (ANI) said the news agency had "been accused of having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on multiple occasions".
> The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing "false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency's reputation, and aimed to discredit its goodwill". It also complained that Wikipedia had "closed" the article about ANI for editing except by Wikipedia's "own editors", citing this as evidence of defamation with malicious intent and evidence that WMF was using its "officials" to "actively participate" in controlling content.
> According to Newslaundry, the sentence ANI objects to has "clear citations that lead to the primary source of information", including to The Caravan, The Ken, BBC News, EU DisinfoLab, Politico, and The Diplomat. Newslaundry and journalist Nikhil Pahwa pointed out that none of the media organizations used as sources were included in ANI's complaint. According to The Indian Express, the lawsuit is an attempt to hold WMF liable for edits to Wikipedia.
> Software Freedom Law Center, India, a member-affiliate of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, found the suit to be an attempt at stifling free speech. Nishant Shah, professor of Global Media at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, wrote that Chawla's decision to order the release of personally-identifying information was "a challenge to freedom of speech and information" and would result in the censorship of "any form of critical information that powerful organisations do not like". Pahwa called it censorship that threatened to "stifle the flow of information and knowledge". Multiple lawyers have critiqued Manomhan and Gedela's order to take down the page on the litigation, too, disagreeing with the allegations of interfering with judicial proceedings and noting similar coverage by mainstream media.
> Tanveer Hasan, director of the Centre for Internet and Society, called the proceedings an "assault on the freedom of speech under the guise of technological regulation".
It is very standard in many jurisdictions for courts to prevent either party from making public statements on a case until it is resolved. That is what is going on here.
I don't find this argument compelling in this case, because news agencies cited by the Wikipedia article in question were not themselves subject to similar or the same lawsuit.
If you are subject to a lawsuit and the judge issues a gag order restricting you (and the party suing you) from making public statements about the court case until it is resolved, that wouldn't be weird no?
If that were to happen, and you were to then publish an article about this exact court case on your blog, you'd be found in contempt of court and rightly so. Even if the blog article only summarizes and links to other content, like the news articles. You were restricted from speaking about the case, and you broke that restriction. What part of "don't make public statements about this case" didn't you understand?
That's what's going on here. Wikipedia is, essentially, Wikimedia Foundation's blog. This article about the court case is, legally speaking, Wikimedia speaking about an ongoing case they are involved with. If the court issues a gag order, they have to respect it. This is subjudice, not censorship.
Wikimedia Foundation is not the author of Wikipedia - individual editors are. WMF isn't making any statements - editors are when they write articles. It's censoring speech of editors not subject to the jurisdiction of the court, and threatening legal penalties against the English language Wikipedia.
The fact that this hasn't happened before should tell everyone that this is not business as usual. No other government in the world has caused WMF to respond in such a way, which leads me to believe that this case is not as obvious as you say.
Also, due to license terms of Wikipedia, by deleting the page, individually and collectively, Wikipedia editors are being denied their rights as authors. This may be a copyright violation in India, in the jurisdiction of the editors, in the legal jurisdiction in which WMF/Wikipedia are incorporated in, and/or all of the above, that is to say, worldwide.
That's not how legal responsibility is assigned in nearly all jurisdictions. It doesn't matter who wrote some speech. It matters who _hosted_ the speech. I'm not a solicitor in India so I can't say for certain how things are handled here, but this is not surprising for any commonwealth jurisdiction.
It matters who hosted the speech, but also what jurisdiction the host is in. India cannot hope to enforce this outside India.
I suspect WMF complied in protest in order to draw attention to the censorious nature of the rulings so far.
Seems like it's working well for them.
Wikipedia explicitly considers it censorship:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia#India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
According to Jimbo Wales, they complied in order to not "lose the possibility to appeal". Apparently, "the short term legal requirements in order to not wreck the long term chance of victory made this a necessary step." WMF lawyers are doing "everything [they] can to win this battle for the long run, as opposed to petulantly refusing to do something today."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#c...
Thanks for that citation, that really helps.
Archived just in case!
https://archive.is/qjppc
I disagree with this. The buck stops with WMF. They write the rules and they are the ultimate arbiters of edit wars. They are the ones ultimately responsible for granting and taking away privileges from users.
If something is written on wikipedia it's because they are okay with it. The political slant of wikipedia is an expression of WMF views.
Also an important point is that wikipedia aims to create a work that is a coherent whole spoken with one voice rather than say hosting a discussion where writing is clearly attributed to its respective authors.
Wikipedia endeavors to have neutral point of view, and there are nearly 900 “admin” editors. This is not an easy consensus, and I’m not sure that such sweeping statements applied collectively to MWF or Wikipedia are expressing to me what you might seek to convey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians