California Supreme Court OKs Web Libel Immunity 107
tanman writes "The California Supreme Court has ruled that websites which publish libelous text written by third parties cannot be sued for libel, reports CNN. The ruling found for the defendant, who was backed by the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The internet service companies following the case feared that a ruling against the defendant would find them liable for content posted to their respective websites. Even though the court allowed this could have far-reaching consequences, they ultimately wanted this to be a question more for Congress than the courts." From the article: "The case centers on an opinion piece sent via e-mail to Ilena Rosenthal, a woman's health advocate who runs various message boards and promotes alternative medicine. The scathing missive, written by Tim Bolen, accused Dr. Terry Polevoy, of Canada, of stalking a Canadian radio producer and included various invectives directed at Polevoy and Dr. Stephen Barrett, of Pennsylvania. The two doctors operated Web sites devoted to exposing health frauds. After Rosenthal posted the piece to two newsgroups, Polevoy and Barrett sued her, Bolen and others for libel. The lawsuit accuses Rosenthal of republishing the information after being warned it was false and defamatory."
games (Score:2, Funny)
Common sense for a change (Score:1)
Re:Common sense for a change (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not what this decision is about (Score:5, Informative)
Except in this case Rosenthal did exercise editorial control. She doesn't run a blog comments section; she broadcast Bolen's accusations to Usenet under her own account.
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Re:Common sense for a change (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that rules shouldn't necessarily change - and I don't think they have, really. I think the distinction that needs to be made is not Passive vs Active publication (although those might be useful terms for the concept - rather, the concept of a printer - as opposed to a publisher or an editor needs to be brought forward into the the present day.
To apply the paradigm of hardcopy book writing, printing, and publishing to online content is not that difficult (one hopes it might even be simple enough for lawyers, courts, and lawmakers to understand - although understanding may not be sufficient in and of itself to keep those types of folk from screwing it up):
An individual who writes something is a writer.
When that individual posts writing to an internet forum - say a blog or a forum (for now I'm just talking about writing that is not being done as "work-made-for-hire" or some other editorially-controlled, other-directed work) - they are publishing that work. This individual can be said to be a self-published writer.
The individual, organization, or company providing the blog or forum technical facilities remain in a position analogous to that of a printer - in the "old-school" sense of the word, when "printer" was "someone who prints things [on a printing press]". Perhaps print shop would be more descriptive. In either case, whether you prefer printer or print shop (there is a subtle distinction in that the added shop may imply a company or organization, whereas printer might be taken to mean an individual, although in the old days "send it to the printers'" was a common phrase) - whichever you prefer, the printer has essentially no control over content, and is typically in no way responsible for the intellectual property content of the work.
I believe this is similar to the line of thought that went into the "common carrier" concept in telecommunications, which - while not directly applicable to this kind of situation - is obviously similar in it's handling of IP and [potentially] legally actionable communications.
Just as one does not prosecute (or sue) the phone company if a criminal uses a phone in the commission or a crime (or if a person slanders another over the phone), I don't know of many successful cases of a printer being sued or prosecuted over the contents of a book - perhaps if you went back to the early days of the printing press - I think some printers were prosecuted for printing e.g. Bibles, but they were arguably publishing (distributing) that work, as well as just printing it.
I believe I am correct in saying that it is typically the publisher - and to some extent the writer - who gets the legal fallout when something is written and released to the public which has legal ramifications. I actually think that is appropriate, provided we can make distinction between publishing and [what on the Internet amounts to] printing.
Also, there's the fact that if libel someone on the internet, I think I should get the full benefit of the publicity that goes along with the lawsuit (the phrase "there is no such thing as bad publicity" originated in the newspaper publishing industry, did it not?) - why should I share the spotlight with News Corp if I libel someone on MySpace.com, after all?
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It seems to me that sights like these should not only be ethically bound but legally bound to provide an active means to challenge and remove posts which contain false or misleading statements since they more or less directly identify individuals involved. At the very least, they shou
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It's like saying you should have a right to leave loaded guns around, since you can't control EVERYONE it's clearly not your safety problem. Sites like Amazon, and usenet providers, are wonderful places to joe-job and spread disgusting shite without any recourse. I think it's about time they take some reponsibili
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There is a distinction. I go to Amazon.com and boom it says "Person $x is a spammer retard, don't buy their book." Sure the poster is the guy who wrote that, but it's Amazon that causes it to be distributed (e.g., published) and available for others. Since Amazon is the one distributing the libel they're the ones who are
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2) Yes, they can either prevent it (e.g. ban the user by IP, require 24 hours before posting reviews,
3) acusing someone of being a spammer retard and that you should avoid the book at all cost is actually libel as defined in section 298 of
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2) It is technically impossible for them to prevent it. (None of your recommendations would ban THAT particular user w/o alienating other potentially valid readers of your book.) Freedom of speech and press gives them the right.
3) I wasn't sure from your post if this was an example you gave or the actual offensive post. I totally agree with you that it is libel
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It's similar to the term "butt-head" as used in the case of Apple Computer when sued by Carl Sagan for using the code name "BHA" which was generally understood to mean "butt-headed astronomer". The judge ruled that the term "butt-head" cannot be considered libel as it is impossible to use the term "butt-head" to discredit
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That to me that doesn't sound like libel, but IANAL. Now if they would of accused you of fudging your research, or claim that you are a card carrying member of N.A.M.B.L.A., or say that you didn't really have a degree in X, that would be libelous. Besides, I would guess most people that read reviews from sites that let anonymous people post would take those reviews with a large grain of salt. I know I do. But freedom of speech must be protected - som
But you are (Score:2)
The opinion is explicit that libel victims have recourse against the person who libeled them.
The exemption is for service providers and conduits, and a single illustration proves how necessary it is. Imagine a defamatory statement on Usenet. Thousands of sites will be passing that statement along, storing it, and showing it to users. If the hosts and forwarders were in the legal line of fire, they'd shut down and there wouldn't be a Usenet. Most of us wou
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Now, I should mention that in my case Amazon *was* good enough to remove the libelous reviews in only a day or two. So I don't want to give the impression that they're irresponsible. I just don't think they should be totally immune because who knows if in the future they will react with the same speed and objectiveness.
Tom
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Sadly in my case the best solution is to ride it out. A few trolls in usenet decide they want to cause trouble and there isn't much I can do so long as NNTP servers accept anonymous posting (and usenet readers continue to be ignorant about how NNTP works...).
Tom
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That's extremely difficult today, and why anonymity is sometimes VERY necessary.
But you do have a quick and easy way of dealing with something someone else says or publishes today. The legal system doesn't come into play at all.
You can just ignore it.
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To add insult to inj
Huge win for corrupt news organizations (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no fan of lawsuits, and this decision is certainly a win for bloggers and most honest web publishers, but it sounds like the consequences of this decision were not well thought out (particularly in respect to the larger news organizations or tabloids).
Re:Huge win for corrupt news organizations (Score:5, Insightful)
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I hate when someone regurgitates this bullshit. The meaning of freedom is being free. Read the definition [answers.com].
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Sure, but when you use your freedom to do bad things, you still have to face consequences.
In the philosophy that underlies our system of government, freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. Especially in matters of speech, the government is not allowed to act in a paternalistically preemptive way, based on the speculation that harm might result. In fact it is sometimes prevented from doing things when demonstrable harm will result, because granting too m
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> speculation that harm might result.
Bombing civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, however, IS allowed.
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Actually, an important distinction that is often missed is between prevention and preemption.
Often, these are used as if synonymous, as I have above. But prevention is much broader than preemption, which refers to stopping a process that is already in motion. In general, when the government can take "preventive" steps against its citizens, these steps would be more precisely described as "preemptive". It's the difference between shutting down m
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> when in fact at most what we were doing could be said to be "preventing".
No, you were "causing" conflict, but it was justified as a pre-emptive strike.
> The justifications were clearly being misrepresented, in my opinion.
Well, they just didn't make sense. It was WMD first, then, once it became clear that none would be found, it was regime change. Neither charge made sense - the WMD they once had w
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Information on the internet from ordinary users, has to be treated like information you get from a drunkard at a bar. You have no idea if it's
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Of course, all it would take for the web publisher to be sued for libel is for this article to be tracked back to the publisher through the process of discovery.
If you've ever been through a discovery process, you'll know that people get deposed, evidence is gathered, and almost anything is fair game to ask for, within reason. E-mails, memos, files. Maybe the shredder does wonderful things, but e-mails are forever these days.
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Judges are not computers (Score:2)
Re:Huge win for corrupt news organizations (Score:5, Insightful)
Infamy (Score:2)
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The proper role of the court is to interpret the existing laws and apply them to their decisions in specific instances. If the current laws are not covering a particular point or require amendment then that is a job for Congress or your state legislature and NOT the courts. The justices acted appropriately in this case.
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New precedents (Score:2, Interesting)
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Except publishers of newspapers will have a lot of trouble arguing that they aren't the publishers of the information, whereas online services and their users are, explicitly, under federal statute, legally defined as not being "publishers" or "speakers" of information they make available online if that information originated with someone else.
This case applied a very
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I doubt it, the role of freelance reporters and news services (e.g. Reuters) is well established.
Why should a message board get special treatment? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Why should a message board get special treatmen (Score:3, Informative)
I think your misunderstanding the ruling. Here's the clearest thing I saw from the article:
Unless Congress revises the existing law, people who claim they were defamed in an Internet posting can only seek damages from the original source of the statement, the court ruled..
So, if I were to write something libel about you in the comments section of a /. article, you can sue /. You can however, come after me. If a third party news site picks up and reports based on what I posted, you can go after them e
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I think your post is missing a few 't.
Re:Why should a message board get special treatmen (Score:2)
Publishers like newspapers, magazines and tv broadcasters are held liable for everything that their employees produce, post, and broadcast...
Excellent point. However, are they also as responsible for the Letters to the Editor section? I find this a closer analogy. The writer of the article was, to my knowledge, not an employee of the publisher in this case.
Re:Why should a message board get special treatmen (Score:4, Insightful)
Really, the issue is what "publishing" means. Traditionally, publishing requires the publisher to select and edit stories which would then be pushed out to readers. The internet is different; a site like
My argument would be that the new publishers are the people hitting "submit" on the web form, since they're the ones selecting stories, validating them for truth (I crack me up), editing them for typos, and making the decision to make them public (i.e., "publish" them). Which is what this court decision seems to be in agreement with.
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I would say "validate for interest", not for truth. Letters to the editors are a tool for the community to voice their concerns about current events. In a sense they complement
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Pre-approved or not (Score:3, Insightful)
If sites like
Most advertisement funded or hobbyist sites would not be able to afford this. Which mean that the net would fall back into the hands of a few large media corporations, and most of the democratic potential of the Internet would get
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One might, but as is apparent from the labels of both the broad title of law (the "Communications Decency Act") and the specific applicable subsection ("Protection for "Good Samaritan" blocking and screening of offensive material"), encouraging free speech is the precise opposite of Congress' intent with this liability shield, it was indeed intended to discourage content that Congress
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"Shouldn't", I dunno, but they don't get the same treatment because they were clever enough to go to Congress and convince them that immunizing them against libel liability would somehow be useful to protecting kids against pornography. The broad liability shield in the CDA was specif
How about if the third party is anonymous? (Score:1, Redundant)
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What about redistributing anonymous posts? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And hey, it's free publicity. Perhaps someone Googling for baby-eating sites will come upon me instead, and suddenly realize they need to hire someone with my skills f
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I suppose the best solution is to play the game in reverse.
Either make it so that regardless of claims that no matter how bad the libel, that your image won't change. Or perhaps use your own methods to call the source into question.
The problem of society that sees false information as negative to
How can this possibly be a sensible result? (Score:3, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I can't RTFA for some reason, so I'm only going on the summary here.
Rashly assuming that said summary is accurate, this seems like a dangerous ruling. It basically says that deliberately and directly propagating harmful untruths about someone on-line is OK. Surely the whole point of defamation laws is surely that spreading those harmful untruths around is, well, harmful, and therefore should not be permitted (and compensation due if that law is broken)?
Now, you can make strong arguments both ways about the responsibilities and freedoms of on-line service providers in relation to content supplied by others but hosted on or transmitted by the service provider's systems.
On the one hand, there is the "common carrier" argument: service providers don't know about or control the content and therefore shouldn't be held responsible for it. By extension, you have to consider that even if they do receive a complaint from someone, that person may or may not be justified in making that complaint, and it may or may not be appropriate for the service provider to censor content on request.
On the other hand, this is a huge legal loophole, which basically says that on-line free speech is completely unaccountable, even in cases like defamation where the same speech is clearly held by law to be an abuse in other contexts. In the current legal and technological climate, where a lengthy court process is required to get anything done about anything yet the information can spread very fast, there's simply no effective way for someone who is damaged by this sort of action to defend themselves.
The only way forward, as far as I can see, is to introduce fast-track legal processes that can resolve fairly straightforward cases quickly and relatively informally, following a similar principle to small claims courts. Such a legal framework could deal with all kinds of on-line abuses -- not least defamation and copyright infringement -- in a timely fashion, without resorting to appointing service providers to the role of courts.
To me, this makes far more sense than either attempting technological controls (as copyright holders are doing with DRM, for example) or just giving up (as frequently seems the case with defamation, and people offering bad advice on regulated subjects like health, law and finances). Of course, a healthy dose of population education, so that people don't just believe anything they see (particularly from an anonymous source on a random web site or chat room) wouldn't do any harm, either.
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So if I say that you go around burning buildings and drowning kittens, Slashdot would be safe, but I could still be a participant in the great American sport of lawsuits.
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Sure, but combined with anonymity, that immediately implies that anyone can write anything about anyone without liability, as long as the original author remains anonymous. Other posts in this discussion have given examples about how this could be abused by news organisations trying to push an agenda; the leaking rumours about new Apple hardware that were mentioned on Slashdot a few months back come to mind as another possible case.
Moreover, with the rise of on-line distribution of information, we have a
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Of course, folks could complain that this is Outrageous Judicial Restraint. =)
The real way to get away with 'libel' is (Score:2, Troll)
As it should be (Score:1)
It's a lose - lose situation (Score:1)
I can search long and hard for info about someone I don't like, public figure or not? And spread the news started by someone else.
Yeah, free speech, that's great, but who or what's going to protect someone like me or normal every day people from such stuff. It's all great until someone
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I'm pretty sure you can still be sued for that.
All this does is mean that the sites that you post to cannot be sued for displaying what you posted.
i.e. you slander someone on slashdot. That person can sue you, but not slashdot.
Then again, i didn't read the article so who knows
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"Unless Congress revises the existing law, people who claim they were defamed in an Internet posting can only seek damages from the original source of the statement, the court ruled."
But it seems that only the original poster can be sued....
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Exactly. The person who happens to be providing the web hosting cannot be.
If you stand up on a soap box and start spouting libel, the soap box manufacturer can't be sued for it's 'part' in that libel, right? Well, if you buy web hosting and put libel on your site, the host now can't be sued for it's 'part' in the libel. Should the hoster, however, endorse the libel, reprint it elsewhere, and so on, they've then involved themselves.
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"Okay, so now I can take something I find on the web, written by someone else, and even if I know it is untrue, or suspected untruth, or even just uncertain of it's truth, I can spread it around and be safe from any liability."
NO! I don't read that into this ruling at all. The ruling is stating that if you operate a WEB SITE, you don't have to be responsible fo
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Another unrelated libel... (Score:1, Insightful)
Needless to say the FBI got involved and traced the letter to an anonymous terminal at a US university. Art who now lives in Manilla, Phillipines with his Filipino wife is in a dangerous position because the newspapers keep printing it even after it's been proven to be a hoax. All he can do is decry
This means... (Score:1)
Not that that ever stopped anyone here at Slashdot anyway.
Actually, in all seriousness, it seemed to me that this ruling was saying that if I post something libelous (sp? maybe not a word?) here on Slashdot, Slashdot can't be sued for it. But if Slashdot is ordered to turn over my registration information, or perhaps figure out the IP from which I'm posting... if they could get a reasonable finger on me, they could still sue me. I d
Too gray for my taste (Score:2)
If we were talking about a fully automated BBS/newsgroup/Slash/blog/etc where there is no direct involvement between the site host and any particular message, IMO it would be completely clear that the host should not be liable. The only possible exception might be if the host received an explicit sworn statement that the message is libelous or otherwise illegal, but refuses to remove it. And that would only be maybe.
However, in this case we have a manually moderated forum, where the host made a conscious
This was inevitable... (Score:1)
It's becoming harder and harder to find countries with governments sympathetic to freedom of information. If the pirate party ever got off the ground, I could see a massive opportunity for people to create sites that share information in the way that YouTube did before it got bought
bittorrent sites (Score:2)
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Tim Bolen is a spammer (Score:2)
So, in honor of the article... (Score:2, Funny)
not good (Score:1)
If this is case it is a very very bad ruling which turns the web from a place where "freedom of speech is allowed" to
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This is correct.
In other news ... (Score:1)
What about this? (Score:1)