11/04/2010, 02:53 AM
Not the first time on this issue, but anyway:
- Source: [The Register]
As for the actual "infringing" content:
Quote:Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has reported the site's parent organization to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying he believes the Wikimedia Commons "may be knowingly distributing child pornography."
Earlier this week, Sanger disclosed his FBI report with a post to a public mailing list and later an open letter to a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's board of trustees. In the letter, he also says he notified his Senators and Congressional representatives over the images in question.
Sanger - who parted ways with Wikipedia in 2002 over what he calls "disagreements about editorial and management policy" - tells The Reg that he filed his report through the FBI's website.
"I believe Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/), owned and hosted by the California-based Wikimedia Foundation, may be knowingly distributing child pornography," reads his letter to the bureau and his Senators and representatives, before providing specific weblinks, one to a "pedophilia" category that includes a limited number of images. "I don't know if there is any more, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is - the content on the various Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and various others, are truly vast."
Sanger goes on to say that that in his "non-lawyer's opinion," he believes that the images violate a US law against "obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children" (18 USC ยง1466A(2)(A)).
Spoiler for If you're wondering what happened to the previous incident:
Quote:This is not the first time the Wikimedia Foundation has been accused of hosting child pornography. In May of 2008, an unfinished story on Wikimedia's own Wikinews project repeated a report that the FBI was investigating Wikipedia for hosting the image of a mid-1970s record album cover from German heavy metal band the Scorpions. But the story was removed and the image remained, and in December of that year, the image turned up on a blacklist maintained by the Internet Watch Foundation UK, which meant that access to the site was filtered by at least six British ISPs.
In bizarre fashion, the filtering also resulted in Wikipedia admins banning large swaths of the United Kingdom from editing the site. The IWF later pulled Wikipedia from its blacklist, and the site continues to host the album cover.
As for the actual "infringing" content:
Quote:I believe Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/), owned and hosted by the California-based Wikimedia Foundation, may be knowingly distributing child pornography. The clearest instances I found (I did not want to look for long) are linked from [deleting link; it's a category about pedophilia] and [link deleted; it's a category about something called lolicon]. I don't know if there is any more, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is--the content on the various Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and various others, are truly vast.Source: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sanger%27...to_the_FBI