Stories – Wikimedia Foundation

A Coat of Arms

A European municipality’s corporate design team wrote to the Wikimedia Foundation to demand that the municipality’s coat of arms be removed from Wikipedia. The design team claimed that under the nation’s copyright laws, the coat of arms was not in the public domain.

One of the key principles of the Wikimedia movement is that volunteers should decide what educational content is available on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia Foundation strives to protect such content, unless the law is clear that the requester is entitled to remove the content to which they’re making a claim.

In this situation, we supported the decision of those volunteers to use the coat of arms. Our response to the corporate design team noted that the illegality of using heraldic arms in educational projects is debated even in the municipality’s nation.

An Emergency Disclosure

The Wikimedia Foundation takes seriously its obligations to users and the volunteer community that contributes to Wikipedia, especially their right to privacy. This right came under threat a few months ago when we received a message from the police captain of a European country.

The captain wrote to us to say that someone had taken an image from Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikimedia Commons, and used it in a threatening email to impersonate a prominent political figure in the country.

To find the culprit, the captain demanded that the Foundation provide all information on any users who had accessed the politician’s Wikipedia page and the Commons image over a seven-day period, across 80+ article languages. This request would have resulted in the release of private information for tens of thousands of people. Per our privacy policy, we do not track what individual people read on Wikipedia (except for a few limited exceptions), and we refused the request.

Flip Flop

An IP company writing on behalf of a client emailed the Wikimedia Foundation to demand that we remove a name for a toilet product from Wikipedia. Before we could respond, they wrote again to retract their demand. We acknowledged this and moved on.

One month later, the same IP company wrote to us again on behalf of the same client company. They effectively repeated the demand that they had previously retracted. We asked if this was another accidental report that we could ignore. This time, they told us that it was not an accident.

The Wikimedia Foundation understands that a company needs to protect its trademarks. For example, we are the stewards of the Wikimedia brand trademarks, including Wikipedia. However, as we explained in our response, while this toilet product’s company trademark may prevent competitors from using the trademark, it doesn’t give the company the right to prevent the public from using that term in everyday language. The IP company representative has not yet written back.

Money for Nothing

A copyright enforcement company wrote to the Wikimedia Foundation to demand that we remove a photo of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The company claimed to own the photo, asserted that it was being used without permission, and demanded more than 530€ in compensation.

The Legal Department checked the image and noted that it was uploaded to Commons from Flickr under a Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 license, which allows for the free sharing and reuse of the photo so long as only a couple stipulations are followed.

Therefore, we requested that the enforcement company provide more information through a formal DMCA takedown request.The enforcement company responded by closing the claim.

Behind the Backdoor

A security company wrote to the Foundation’s Legal Department to complain about what they called “defamatory” language in a Wikipedia article. The article in question suggested that the company had worked with a government agency to install backdoors in hardware and software. The Wikipedia article cited references from well-established media outlets to assert these claims. The company’s representative noted they had tried to remove the allegedly defamatory language themselves, but their changes were reversed by the volunteer community that oversees content on Wikimedia projects. Deferring to the community’s judgment, the Legal Department declined to remove the statement.