Cease and desist sent to the Foundation, Brad cannot pretend Sec.230 on this one Options

[Daniel Brandt]

Raul654 has needlessly put the Foundation at risk through a malicious abuse of his Foundation powers. He should be desysopped.

February 24, 2007

DEMAND TO CEASE AND DESIST

Mr. Brad Patrick
General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Fax: 727-258-0207

Dear Mr. Patrick:

Wikimedia Foundation maintains a "spam blacklist" at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spam_blacklist that has listed six domains owned and operated by Public Information Research, a 501c(3) entity, since June, 2006 without justification.

This letter is a cease and desist demand to remove these domains from the spam blacklist.

The six domains were placed on the list because they redirected links coming from en.wikipedia.org from April 2006 to June 2006. None of the six has redirected since June 2006. But they remain on the spam blacklist under false pretenses, namely that "These sites are redirecting requests from Wikimedia sites to a third-party site."

Numerous editors have pointed out that they no longer redirect, but an authorized agent of the Foundation, Mr. Mark A. Pellegrini, has unilaterally kept them on this list. Mr. Pellegrini is a meta administrator and bureaucrat.

Mr. Pellegrini knows full well that they no longer redirect, but is prejudiced against Public Information Research and myself. In response to a challenge about listing these domains, he even libeled me:

"Request denied. Firstly, it's not "accidental censorship" - we are quite intentionally excluding his sites from being linked in Wikipedia. He's made it his mission to "out" as many administrators as possible by posting their personal information (in some cases, personal information of young children). I see no reason why we should allow his idiocy to be linked from Wikipedia. And yes, there's always the possibility he'll do it again. Raul654 18:35, 8 November 2006 (UTC)"

The libelous statement is contained in the false and malicious phrase, "personal information of young children."

It is clear that the spam blacklist is under the direct control of Wikimedia Foundation and its employees and agents. On the Talk page to this list, it is described as follows:

"The associated page is used by the Mediawiki SpamBlacklist extension, and lists strings of text that may not be used in URLs in any page in Wikimedia Foundation projects (as well as many external wikis)."

Our position is that substantial harm is being done to the reputation of Public Information Research by unjustifiably including these domains on the blacklist. Other non-Foundation websites are using this list as an indication of which sites need to be blocked, based on their estimation that the domains on this list are generating spam. None of our domains has ever carried a single advertisement. They are reputable sites, and cannot be accurately described as spam.

This situation has nothing to do with Section 230 of the CDA, and is actionable under the laws of the state of Florida.

We demand that these domains be removed from the list immediately.

Regards,
Daniel Brandt
President

[a view from the hive]

Raul654 has needlessly put the Foundation at risk through a malicious abuse of his Foundation powers. He should be desysopped.

February 24, 2007

DEMAND TO CEASE AND DESIST...

Wait a second. While the comment may be illegal, I don't believe the courts have any authority whatsoever to force someone to include content on their site or am I misunderstanding the nature of your complaint and it being related to the word "spam" in "spam blacklist"

It's private enterprise. Nobody forces Google to include anything in their index. Digg blacklists lots of sites if enough users "digg" it down.

The fact that other sites are using the blacklist does not apply here, nobody is being forced to use this list. The sites using it are well aware of what is blocked and have enabled the list. it does NOT ship w/ default mediawiki installs.

As for the "reputable sites" I would have to say that hive and hive2 by posting information about obviously private persons that could enable one to steal their identity could be seen as "harassment."

"intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person" - I would say that most of the Wiki admins do not classify under this category hence your point is moot.

I will give you credit for revealing your identity while YOU harass people on the internet but still, your claim is one of the most hypocritical I've seen.

[gomi]

... I don't believe the courts have any authority whatsoever to force someone to include content on their site or am I misunderstanding the nature of your complaint and it being related to the word "spam" in "spam blacklist"

Note that last October, an Illinois court (for a while), entered a default judgement of over $10M against SpamHaus for falsely including a company in their "Spam Blacklist". This isn't exactly the same scenario, but clever lawyers can probably make it look so to the right judge. Here is a link to one article about the case. The judgement was ultimately stayed, but the precedent was nonetheless established.

Mr. Brandt does err in some ways, in my opinion, one of them looking to Florida for a jurisdiction. He would be far better off suing in his home state (I don't know what that is). But this may be a more fruitful course of action than the defamation suit, which would tickle all sorts of others to come to the defence of the Section 230 position.