Tesla Demands Logo Takedown
Copyright or copywrong? Tesla tries to take down its logo images while German researchers raise flags about accuracy. Read more about it in this edition of WikiWise.
🔔 Wiki Briefing
Tesla Likes Staying at the DMCA
Tesla has had a rough few years—and seems to be taking it out on Wikipedia? On May 27, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) revealed it had been served with a DMCA copyright infringement notice by the controversial carmaker in September of last year.
As first reported in The Signpost, Tesla’s lawyers demanded that four logos on Wikimedia Commons be removed: its shield, its stylized T, its stylized name, and a combination of the T and the name. Click on the first link and you’ll find nothing, likely because the WMF believed it would lose on the merits, and complied with the request—but only the one.
Wikipedia and the WMF take a bold but rigorous stance on copyrights. For a work to be copyrightable, it has to be sufficiently original. In this view, words, typefaces, and geometric shapes or patterns are excluded.
Other logos considered too simple to copyright—according to Wikipedia—include Apple, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Unfortunately for Tesla, the WMF only found the shield logo to be in violation, and that was largely because it was the exact file Tesla registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
It’s no secret that Tesla’s mercurial founder is no fan of Wikipedia—see our Nov. 15, 2023 edition. That said, a DMCA takedown letter is actually somehow less petty than offering a billion dollars for the site so he can rename it “Dickipedia”.
Pro tip: For those interested in learning about how company logos are added to Wikipedia, see Beutler Ink’s Wiki Resource Library: Adding a New Company Logo to Wikipedia.
📰 In the News
Age Gate or Rage Bait?
The global backlash against Big Tech has led to a wave of new laws and lawsuits, from the EU’s GDPR to U.S. antitrust cases against Meta and Amazon. But one of the more quietly consequential trends is a set of 2023-era laws that mandate age-gating: requiring websites to verify a user’s age in order to restrict minors from accessing harmful content.
While these laws are usually intended to rein in billion-dollar companies, critics argue these laws are overly broad, burdensome by design, and likely to ensnare nonprofit platforms that sometimes host mature content. You know, like Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Foundation has strongly opposed perhaps the best-known of these, the UK’s Online Safety Act. Last week, it also filed an amicus brief in a court case challenging a Utah law requiring websites to verify users’ ages and block adults from interacting with minors.
The Foundation argues: not only does the law violate the First Amendment but, if applied to Wikipedia, it could break its collaborative model entirely. How would Wikipedia work if minors couldn’t view or edit content added by adults, and vice versa?
📚 Research Report
Know When to Fold ‘Em
If you lost a Biergarten bet after using German Wikipedia to check a fact, you may be entitled to financial compensation (from your friend, at least).
German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung used artificial intelligence, double-checked by humans, to survey 1,000 articles on German Wikipedia and found what most Wikipedia readers (hopefully) already knew: sometimes, Wikipedia is wrong. Around a third of the pages reviewed had inaccuracies, and around 20 percent were simply outdated.
So, if you bet that the tallest mountain in Sweden was the northern peak of Kebnekaise because Wikipedia didn’t tell you melting glaciers de-ranked the southern peak to #2 in 2019, you may want to ask for some euros back.
🧩 Wikipedia Facts
If you find yourself in central Europe to fact-check the height of mountains in Sweden, we suggest you take a side trip to Poland to visit the aptly titled Wikipedia Monument. The nearly 7-foot tall statue, created by Mihran Hakobyan and located in Frankfurt Square in Słubice, was created in 2014 to honor the contributors to the world’s encyclopedia.
💡 Tips & Tricks
Wikipedia can help you get your streaming fix, too! WikiFlix launched in May and streamlines how users can search through Wikimedia Commons’ repository of public domain videos—including a few Hollywood classics. Check out the original Steamboat Willie short, revisit the zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, or see the birth of the western with The Great Train Robbery!
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