The Wikipedia Foundation was being sued by three French nationals for invasion of privacy and defamation after a wikipedia page identified them as being gay activists. The French judge Emmanuel Binoche dismissed the case, stating that wikipedia was not responsible for information introduced onto its Web site and stated that web site hosts are not legally bound to monitor information stored on their websites.
In the written ruling Binoche writes: “Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature”
This position is in line with the accepted approach to ISP liability. Gavin Sutter has written extensively on this topic see for example Gavin Sutter (2003) FE/HE Institutions and Liability for Third Party Provided Content.
(via Slashdot)