Cesare Previti has lost the case against Wikipedia. Or rather, against the Wikimedia Foundation which - among other things - manages the most famous multimedia encyclopedia in the world. It all started on January 30, 2013 when the well-known Italian lawyer (former minister and advisor to Silvio Berlusconi) decided to start a lawsuit against Wikimedia because he believed that the Italian version of his encyclopedic entry on Wikipedia was full of inaccurate information and defamatory. According to Previti, the article that concerned him was "pseudo-journalistic gossip fueled by the work of absolutely unreliable subjects".
The Court of Rome established that Wikimedia Foundation cannot be held responsible for the dissemination of allegedly defamatory content. The reason is that, under Italian law, the foundation is a hosting provider (i.e. a space used for publication) and not a content provider. Wikimedia cannot guarantee the accuracy of entries that are posted on Wikipedia, which is the responsibility of individual users. Furthermore, the Court recalled that the content of the items can be corrected and modified by anyone.
The Tribunal also declared that Cesare Previti could have signaled to the community of moderators what the problem was or could have intervened directly to modify what he did not consider correct. The judgment of the Tribunal has immediate effect Previti has 30 days to appeal. It is not yet clear whether she will decide to do it or not.
