 Hi everyone, my name is Jacob Rodgers. This is our presentation on Wikimedia legal history I'm a legal director in the Wikimedia foundations legal department Where I have been for a little over six years and I helped deal with the foundations Litigation and various other legal issues that come up related to the Wikimedia projects And hi everyone, I'm Steven LePorte. I am also a legal director. I'm an attorney for Wikimedia I have been at the Wikimedia foundation on the legal team for nine and a half years Before joining Wikimedia legal I contributed a little bit to English Wikipedia and English wiki source when I was in law school So I am a volunteer enthusiast about Wikimedia in addition to my role as a lawyer All right, so we are going to be talking about the start of the Wikimedia movement the legal landscape and Sort of where things have been where they are going and Some of the trends and changes that we have seen So go ahead and go to the next slide Steve. So past practice and future trends where we started Next slide so I think many of you have heard the story of how Jimmy Wales originally was working on new pedia and they opened up new pedia to Everybody's user-generated content type edits and We got Wikipedia out of just everyone contributing to articles rather than having a bunch of experts vetting all of the original content This was I think a really significant change because Wikipedia is one of the earliest websites that had just this mass Open public kind of discussion Contributions and ability for everybody to contribute and I think even from that very early stage people were Surprised and very pleasantly surprised at how successful that was And I think there are a few things that went into that so Steven next slide Yeah, one of the things I really appreciated about the early days of Wikipedia and sort of the founding of Wikimedia Was how important legal principles were to how the site was designed when you look at this this old screenshot from new pedia, you'll notice that there is a Discussion along the bottom of the definition of free and the free encyclopedia So from the very beginning this notion of free and open was actually something that was built with a lot of Intentionality and a lot of care for some of the legal principles that undergird the encyclopedia and I think that these things sort of carried through Wikipedia's legal history Wikipedia did not start on the Creative Commons license, but it was around Under an open license before Creative Commons Version 3.0 was originally adopted There was a Conversation on Wikipedia that moved the projects over from the original GNU free document license to the Creative Commons license and this Early conversation about Wikipedia and its goals with licensing was really foundational for determining the principles that Wikipedia was built on top of This was a time in the internet when Lawrence Lessig was writing about the the goals of the free and open communities when there was activism about free access to information and this activism was Sort of something that was much broader than Wikipedia, but also motivating people to contribute to projects like Wikipedia Yeah, it is worth noting as well that before These free licenses both the GNU free document license and the Creative Commons licenses The default was that anybody who developed knowledge projects like an encyclopedia Had them locked up under an all rights reserved copyright license and that was how it worked almost everywhere And so it was a really kind of radical new idea as part of the early internet to create a structure Where everyone was giving away their work for free to be reused and remixed by everyone else I think that contributed a lot to the early success of Wikipedia and still contributes to people's interest and willingness to Volunteer their time to contribute to the world's knowledge Next slide the other thing that was happening early on in the creation of Wikipedia was the early years of Structures around intermediary liability protections So in the 1990s there were Not anything quite like websites and online forums and there were some early legal cases in the United States that Treated online forums essentially like publishers if people were coming onto a website and submitting content The people on the forum were monitoring it They became liable and so it was very difficult to have an open discussion forum unless you left it completely Unmoderated because you would be in a situation where any effort that you took to deal with spam or off-topic Conversations could make you liable for Everything that everyone contributed to the forum There was an attempt by the US Congress to solve this and they tried to do this in a Comprehensive way actually with an aim towards censorship, which is why they passed the communications decency act CDA and the Communications decency act was a law that tried to offer many opportunities to protect websites that Wanted to censor content or keep it family friendly or otherwise limited in different ways But one of the things was a protection from liability section 230 That meant that if you were engaging in good faith moderation efforts if you were Hosting a website with user-generated content. You were not liable for what was being posted and in fact, you were not treated as the publisher So even aside from your moderation or your good faith it was just that each person was the publisher of what they wrote and The hosting website was not the publisher and therefore was not liable For what the users were writing After this law was passed it actually turned out that most of the censorship parts of it were Unconstitutional in the United States meaning that they were struck down by the US courts and so through kind of a coincidence of legal structures and Unanticipated Law writing by Congress We ended up with a situation where the rules around censorship were gone, but the protection for Companies that hosted websites with user-generated content was still there and that really enabled the growth of many websites including Wikipedia because the the company's hosting the website didn't have to worry about checking or vetting everything that every user was doing all right, so That was the structure of the early Internet we're now going to talk about a few milestones Yeah, I think if you look at the first decade of Wikipedia, it was built on these sort of early Internet principles That were really founded on this the protections provided under the communications decency act section 230 But there was still some tension over what should be taken down or what should be left up on On on the Internet Originally there was a lot of focus on copyright infringement a lot of concern about some of the revolutions that file-sharing were enabling that allowed people to get more access to creative material and for People to bypass some of the traditional ways that creative material was distributed So out of concern for copyright infringement Congress considered passing a build that would give new powers to To various bodies to remove content to block access to content and specifically to go after Payment processors that were allegedly involved in copyright infringement We in the Wikimedia universe as well as many other free free culture advocates were concerned that the SOPA and PIPA bills were not carefully crafted and could be used to Really upset this balance that it existed for the decade prior. So there was a massive protest online and this led to a The bill ultimately being withdrawn Wikipedia had blacked out for a short period. This wasn't the first time that Wikipedia had protested around a law that was pending There was a protest on Italian Wikipedia and Russian Wikipedia before English Wikipedia's protest on SOPA PIPA But because of the scale of the technical aspect of the SOPA PIPA protest the foundation the foundation legal department foundation technical teams were deeply involved in facilitating this conversation and We're very interested in some of the conversation that came out of this There's a real recognition that the things that were happening in Congress and in legislatures around the world would affect our ability to achieve the Wikimedia mission and if we wanted to achieve the Wikimedia mission Wikimedia needed to be part of those conversations and thanks to the power of the contributors to Wikimedia Perhaps we could steer some of these conversations in a more productive direction for free knowledge alright Another development that I think really changed the nature of the internet and how people think about the internet was the Google Spain decision also called the Casteja case Which occurred in 2014 and which was then followed by the passage of the general data privacy regulation the GDPR in the European Union This was the first time that people really made Individual privacy a major focus of the internet and this was a major change For a very long time in the development of the early internet There was an assumption that information would be freely available forever And that society was being made better by information being free and organized and easily found And the Google Spain case in which an individual's Personal bankruptcy from many years prior was easily found to that person's detriment Led to I think a very serious reconsideration of that principle And that was followed by a very comprehensive law being passed in the European Union that gives Individuals the right to have certain control over their data Particularly to know how their personal data is being used by companies As well as to correct errors and in some cases to ask for their data to be deleted or hidden in various ways And so that has been a really major change since 2014 and how people have thought about the internet and information on the internet It is also I think worth noting that the Google Spain decision and then subsequently the GDPR represents something of a shift in What region of the world has led in regulation? As you heard from the early presentation a lot of focus of the early internet was on the United States Both United States courts and the United States Congress in terms of what legislation they passed And that was in large part due to where many companies were located that were part of the early internet but as some of these things changed and as political trends changed around the world the European Union started to become much more prominent and Has I think in many ways taken the lead on regulating the internet in a number of different ways Next slide So I'm going to talk briefly about where things are now and first let me offer a note of congratulations The movement has become incredible on copyright. It is Humongous we have 35 million articles in all these different languages, but next slide We also have almost no copyright complaints This is our transparency report data from the last few years going back 2018 2019 and early 2020 The Wikimedia Foundation received an incredibly small number of DMCA complaints and as a reminder DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is the US regulation that obligates hosting companies to remove Material that violates copyright when we receive an appropriate formal legal notice The number of notices that we receive annually of this sort is between 10 and 20 with Or rather every six months is between 10 and 20 And many of those notices are themselves improper So you can see that we had a couple periods where we didn't grant any DMCA's at all And in the other times we granted fewer than five And so this has been incredible work I think on the part of our volunteer communities the policies on the various Wikimedia projects that Enable free culture content that allow people to monitor uploads that ensure that what is on wikipedia is vetted properly By users and is good quality Are very clearly working And you can compare that to The number from google, uh, which did not give the exact date range, but their most recent transparency reports, which I checked yesterday lists well over 5 billion DMCA requests received by them and so the number is Just not even comparable Even though our our websites among the wikimedia projects do receive a really large quantity of internet traffic That's even was there more you wanted to add to that No, these numbers are just Tremendous and a good illustration of how easy it is to get sort of bad content removed from the wikimedia projects You don't need to come through the wikimedia legal department to get stuff removed people can make edits themselves And uh, the other admins on the projects can verify content, uh, that you know It needs to be removed for copyright reasons and these programs are incredibly effective and you see that reflected in the numbers here all right Where we are seeing as the foundation's legal department the most activity Is in two areas privacy and defamation And I want to point to a couple of of things under each With privacy wikimedia is getting older Uh, and as we were mentioning with the gdpr and the casteja case People don't feel the same about the internet today as they did 20 years ago Uh, and so the foundation has begun seeing uh complaints sent to us that are legal complaints or sometimes legal threats um Where people are pointing to old wikipedia articles that might have been written more than a decade ago and saying This information is true. This information is accurate But it's so old now that it's no longer notable or important to the public and it shouldn't be out there anymore and for at least some people they feel that Uh personal information about their past acts is harmful to them either because they Want to withdraw from public life for for one reason or another they want to retire or perhaps they want to Just not have their past misdeeds haunt them for the rest of their lives We are also seeing more complaints of defamation. I think this is also related to disinformation efforts There are just way more people on the internet and many people are worried about insults disinformation And they are taking conversation on the internet much more seriously than it was taken in the past because everybody lives their lives All right next slide All right, so this is the future steven. Uh start us off Yeah, the first area where I think we are going to need to spend more time having conversations is around the human rights standards that we can hold ourselves to as a movement and as well as as an organization As we make decisions about the future of The wikimedia projects looking individually at national laws is going to be a challenge because of these conflicts between various requirements And because of our need to reflect sort of global projects rather than different projects Reflecting different laws around the world So we as well as other advocates in our space are increasingly using human rights frameworks for decision making and for accountability Online, so I think there's going to be some really interesting conversations for us to have About where our projects policies and where our legal processes can be updated to better enable human rights And lastly As we spoke about in the very beginning The early internet was shaped by standards around Intermediary liability and the ability of companies to host projects where all users are able to contribute without the company being liable for them Those rules are changing and they are changing around the world in different ways Um, we have seen proposals for change in the european union india indonesia brazil and the united states among other countries The general direction of those proposals is towards making companies more liable for things Or making them be required to create some kind of corporate process to remove content and to give people the ability to Lodge formal legal complaints That's something that we're going to be paying attention to and are going to try as hard as we can to help shape the Law to support the wikimedia movement and the communities So thank you so much for your time And we will be able to take some questions maybe in the conversation after this presentation