This week we celebrated a Dutch premiere: Bob Sijthoff, business man and son of the Financieele Dagblad founder sued the WikiMedia Netherlands foundation and association. He allegedly molested a Swiss banker in 2004 for which he was dragged to court in April 2008. He also bought some apartments, and one of Holland’s most well-known mobsters functioned as a mediator in these transactions.
Of course the news about these shady activities is featured on his Wikipedia page. As you can imagine, Sijthoff doesn’t dig the “insulting” texts.
So he decided to sue Wikipedia. Sijthoff wants them to remove the page as well as to reveal the identity of the author: some guy with the nickname Jacob H.
Sijthoff will be surprised by the effect of his legal action. Hundreds of blog posts and news articles about his case will appear on the web. Whatever he does, nobody can ever Google his name without stumbling upon a blog post like this. That makes his Internet reputation doomed forever.
And you know what, he’ll probably not even win the case. All the mentions on Wikipedia are based on news sources. On December 10th, we’ll know for sure.
[Via: WebWereld]
I’m always amazed by these kind of lawsuits. Is there no one who told him or his lawyer how people on the internet react to these kind of lawsuits?
You think this really happens? It’s really easy to be called naive in this world :-)
He should have made a deal with wikipedia, without any publicity.
A big donation in exchange for his page to be removed…
Suing wikipedia is just plain stupid. xD
yet another Idiot committing web-wide suicide – the one before was some dumb politician called Lutz Heilmann – first page Wikipedia, next his one, all pages afterwards on Google: “Lutz Heilmann fucked it up”, eg. “Lutz Heilmann demonstriert, was die Linke von Demokratie hält …” – translated: “Lutz Heilmann is demonstrating (us), what the Linke thinks of Democracy…”, “…und die Arschkarte zieht: Lutz Heilmann” = “who did fuck up: Lutz Heilmann” or “Lutz Heilmann und Stasi und Schluss damit” = “Lutz Heuilmann and Stasi and out”.
cu, w0lf.
streisand effect etc. big deal.