Actor Ron Livingston, known for his roles in Office Space, and Sex and the City, has filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles against Wikipedia after the page about him wrongly claimed he was gay and in a relationship with someone named Lee Dennison.
Ron Livingston, who is married to Rosemarie DeWitt, has cited libel, invasion of privacy, and using his name without permission. The lawsuit states that each time the information is amended, the ‘hacker’ almost immediately changes the information again. According to TMZ, Ron Livingston also believes the defendant created fake Facebook profile pages for both himself and Lee Dennison, linking the pages as ‘in a relationship’.
However Livingston’s claims may be affected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. As Mashable points out ‘given that the online detractor is anonymous, the case would likely require Wikipedia to reveal the poster’s identity to move forward.’
There was an interesting precedent set in August of this year when Google was forced, by the Manhattan Supreme Court, to reveal the identity of an offensive blogger as part of a defamation suit.
[Image: xkcd]
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It's appropriate that you'd have a blog entry on this (and there's no “e” at the end of Livingston's name, btw), because this entire episode represents a complete failure of moderation on the part of Wikipedia, a site with nearly 2,000 administrators all over the world, as well as Facebook and at least a dozen other public forums and blogs. The Wikipedia Review (of which I myself am a moderator) smelled a rat almost immediately and actually determined the perpetrator of this hoax within just two days – he wasn't really doing all that much to conceal himself. (Hint: There is no such person as “Lee Dennison.”) The blog entry makes for interesting reading, and the 16-page forum thread offers much more detail.
Thanks for picking up on the typo (fixed!)
Your expanded blog post certainly makes for fascinating reading.