In a first, Wikipedia takes down article globally after Delhi HC order
thehindu.com
thehindu.com
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:
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...
Asian News International used the Delhi High Court to censor Wikipedia? Or did the court order the censorship ex officio?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-sur-Haute_military_radi...
Worldwide blocks for a specific page are unprecedented.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/win-free-speech-austra...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
Haha, we are talking about Indian law. And US copyright law is (thanks to MPAA, RIAA and international treaties) almost universally enforced.
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.
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.
In the US, the judge tells the jury to not read articles about the case, and expects the jury to do their job.
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.
Emphasis mine
> The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing "false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency's reputation
Also, is the principle of subjudice applied in countries without jurors?
Third party news outlets aren’t involved in this case. There is a clear distinction between involved parties and independent journalism.
Welcome to EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#c...
This is a nothing burger.
> amounts to interference in Court proceedings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgW2Xkz21Wc
https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/09/18/explained-whats-ani-v...
> 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...
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#c...
Archived just in case!
I hate this accelerationist tendency in me because the harm to real people is so high, but do it you cowards. Nations keep trying to assert themselves, declare themselves bigger in some kind of refutation of the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace, but it's broadly unenforceable & self injuring in extreme to cut yourself off from the world.
Whether to shield contributors is a complex question, one I do not envy agencies for.
It'll be interesting to see if this litigation & strong willed court helps or hurts the perception that ANI is in the pockets of the ruling party. This feels a little too eccentric to go big-time world wide, but I wonder if people in India had strong opinions about this before and how that will change now. What's the Streisand effect here?