Stories

Small Request, Bigger Principle

During this reporting cycle, we received a request asking us to take down a map of a country on Wikimedia Commons that compared its shape to an animal.

While the Foundation and volunteer editors saw the image as simply illustrative of the nation’s geographic shape (and widely used in external sources), the nation’s requester saw it as derogatory, likely due to negative attributes ascribed to the respective animal species. In cases of such disputes, the Foundation strongly weighs the usefulness of the content in question against the possible harm caused by the image.

The Foundation debated on how best to respond to the unusual request. After assessing the potential harm against the overall usefulness of the image, we ultimately decided to not remove the image.

At the Movies

The Foundation often receives takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for potentially infringing work that may be uploaded to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, or other Wikimedia projects. We received one such request this cycle to remove a 1960s movie by a well-known director.

As is common with DMCA takedown requests, we replied to the requester, asking for proof that they held the copyright for the movie. Proof of this nature is required for several reasons, including combating abusive usage of the DMCA.

We received no response from the initial requester. The film remains available for viewing on Wikimedia Commons.

Mooting

During this reporting period, a member of the Wikipedia volunteer community wrote to the Wikimedia Foundation to report that a company sent the community a demand letter, requiring us to modify a Wikipedia article about a lawsuit in which the company had been involved.

At first, the letter seemed to be one in a long line of letters we receive, demanding that we remove factual (but unflattering) information about a company. However, the Foundation carefully read the court’s decision, which is linked in the article, and one of the company’s demands was supported in it. The article stated that the company had been found to discriminate against women employees, but that substantive legal issue was not addressed by the court, thereby making the issue “moot.”

We advised the volunteer community that an opening sentence in the article could be modified to better reflect the court’s opinion, adding that the company’s other demands were editorial and, therefore, within the community’s remit. The community decided that the company’s other concerns could therefore be addressed on the article’s Talk page.

The Mask Slips

The Wikimedia Foundation received a request from an attorney to remove a user page. The attorney claimed that the page was part of an impersonation campaign across a variety of online platforms that included their client’s name and photos, some of which were sexually explicit.

The Foundation verified the user and found that the page indeed used the client’s name, and had made one upload of a photo of the person being impersonated (which had been later deleted). While it was possible that the client was simply trying to remove mentions of their name from the internet, the severity of consequences (particularly given the nature of some of the material uploaded to other platforms about the same person) suggested the risk to the individual was high.

The Wikipedia volunteer community was able to use the information provided by the Foundation to come to a decision about the user page, which they deleted.

Historic Homes

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeing an increasing number of requests involving photos of houses in Europe, which are often posted to Wikipedia lists or articles, or to Wikimedia Commons. This might happen in cases where the house has architectural or historic interest. However, the inhabitants of such houses will write to us over privacy concerns, as they simply don’t want photos of their houses posted to Wikimedia projects.

However, many countries have laws that cover such situations. For example, in Germany, the freedom of panorama allows people to take photos (as well as videos and even create paintings) of buildings in the public space, assuming the photographers don’t use further tools like ladders or airplanes to view the building. Some European countries allow buildings, as well as public sculptures. In the US, only buildings are allowed; while in other countries, buildings, sculptures, and other public art are not allowed to be photographed at all.

Therefore, unless the building’s inhabitants are at actual privacy risk (say, if they are in the photo or something uniquely identifiable, like a car’s license plate, is visible in the photo) the Foundation does not take action on such requests. The volunteer community also rarely takes down such photos under local freedom of panorama laws.