Recent Blog Posts Discussing Section 230

[A]ll it takes to kill a show forever, is to get one episode pulled. If we convince the network to pull this episode for the sake of Muslims, then the Catholics can demand a show they don't like get pulled . . . and so on and so on, until Family Guy is no more - it's exactly what happened to Laverne & Shirley.- Eric Cartman, South Park , Cartoon Wars I

It doesn’t take much to whittle away a law. One need only use the Cartman technique – ask for one exception and wait for others to follow. It is death by a thousand cuts on the legal stage.   read more »

I am constantly impressed with plaintiffs' hapless charges against the nearly impenetrable immunity that is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“Section 230”).  Time and time again, angry plaintiffs bring suit against websites because some unknown third party posted questionable, if not illegal, material.  And time and time again, those claims are stymied by Section 230, which grants the websites immunity from liability for those third-party postings.  Seriously, there are loads of these cases, and they almost always fail — why do plaintiffs keep bringing them?   read more »

Back in February, Denise Finkel, a 2008 graduate of Oceanside High School on Long Island, sued four of her former high school classmates and their parents after the students created a private Facebook group called "90 Cents Short of a Dollar," which allegedly contained false and defamatory statements about her. 

Rather surprisingly, Finkel also sued Facebook, claiming that the über-popular social network should be held liable for publishing the defamatory statements because it "should have known that such statements were false and/or have taken steps to verify the genuineness" of the statements. Complaint ¶ 28.  (The complaint also alleges that the students' parents are liable for negligently failing to supervise their children.)

As Eric Goldman presciently noted at the time, "[w]ith respect to the claim against Facebook, this lawsuit is unquestionably DOA."  After all, even a cursory reading of the complaint demonstrates that Facebook qualifies for protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Indeed, our database is littered with the wreckage of similar claims filed against social networks that ran aground on Section 230's protective shoals.   read more »

On this blog, I typically write about frivolous or ill-considered lawsuits. In the long, long ago, before I came to law school, I wrote about video games. So imagine my unbridled joy upon reading that Jack Thompson (think: King Richard I of the Anti-Video Game Crusade) filed a pointless, dead-end  lawsuit against Facebook.  Let the Games Begin!   read more »

IP Osgoode alerts us to an interesting decision from the Court of Appeal for British Columbia that has important implications for online speech in Canada.  In an opinion issued earlier this month, the Canadian court held that Jon Newton of p2pnet news could not be held liable for linking to allegedly defamatory articles written by others about politician Wayne Crookes. The appellate ruling upheld a lower court decision last fall dismissing Crookes' case against Newton.

In much the way CMLP often does, in 2006 Newton published a blog post about a defamation lawsuit brought by Crookes against Michael Pilling, who runs OpenPolitics.ca.  In his post about the lawsuit, Newton linked to the allegedly defamatory articles in question on OpenPolitics.ca, as well as to an article posted on another website.  Newton did not reproduce or comment on any of the allegedly defamatory material.  Here's the important passage:   read more »

Even though Glenn Beck has a prime spot on cable television to offer up his beliefs, it's sometimes quite hard to understand what his beliefs actually are.  For example, as Jon Stewart has pointed out, he believes we have the best healthcare in the world, except when he says it's a nightmare.  Or as Politico underscored, he believes that President Obama is a racist, but he doesn't believe that Obama doesn't like white people.

But if there's one thing Beck believes, it's that he didn't rape and murder a young girl in 1990.  And he's siccing his lawyers on a website that asks him — with tongue firmly placed in its virtual cheek — to deny it.   read more »

Search engines have become the new deep pockets in this age of cyber-litigation.  Despite the fact that they do not control the content of the sites they index in any way, people still routinely seek to hold them liable for unsavory or objectionable things that appear in search results.  One might have thought that passage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“Section 230”) back in 1996 would have curtailed such suits, but alas, this has not been the case.   read more »

If you've spent any time in front of a television screen during the last year, you've seen the ads. Even Ed McMahon and MC Hammer got in on the act.  Since 2007, the recession phenomena Cash4Gold has spurred a cottage industry of Internet-age pawnshops, poping up on television screens and in mall kiosks across the land.   read more »

Yet another lawsuit that probably should never have been brought has been dismissed due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act ("Section 230"), despite the court’s earlier indulgence in allowing the plaintiff to amend her complaint and get a second bite at the apple.  The case is Goddard v. Google, Inc., and in his July 30 opinion Judge Jeremy Fogel reconfirmed that Section 230’s protections are broad, while indicating that the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, LLC, 521 F.3d 1157 (9th Cir. 2008) (en banc) should be construed narrowly.

Daniel Neiditch, President of the Board for Atelier Condos on West 42nd Street in New York City, filed a lawsuit last Wednesday against two condo owners and three former employees, alleging that they published defamatory statements on various websites and blogs (defunct), as well as on Twitter (also defunct).  The condo building's property manager and the estate of its former resident manager also joined as plaintiffs in the lawsuit,* which was filed in New York Supreme Court, New York County. The case against the individual defendants is fairly complex and ultimately not that interesting — it involves a string of different websites and some pretty horrific accusations of "murder, bribery, extortion, illicit payoffs, and corruption." Cmplt. ¶ 1.

What makes the case notable is that Neiditch and his fellow plaintiffs also sued Twitter, WordPress.com, and Ning for hosting the allegedly defamatory content, and Go Daddy for providing URL redirects to it.   read more »

As nearly every American lawyer knows, London is the libel capital of the world.  There are a bunch of reasons why, of course: defendants have the burden of proving the truth of their statements; neither negligence nor actual malice is required for liability; there's no distinction between public and private figures; etc.  But regardless of the reasons, Great Britain is the place to sue for defamation.  Heck, it's so bad that it's gotten the lefty ACLU in bed with the neo-con American Center for Democracy!  So you know it's serious.

That makes this week's ruling in Britain that Google isn't liable for the content of its users quite noteworthy.  Google was sued for defamation by a London-based company called Metropolitan International Schools Ltd ("MIS"), which offers correspondence courses in game design marketed as "Train2Game."  If one searches for that term on Google, among the results are forums hosted by digitaltrends.com where Train2Game is called a scam. According to a fairly lengthy write-up of the lawsuit on the site out-law.com (run by Pinsent Masons LLP), MIS was particularly peeved by the phrase "Train2Game new SCAM for Scheidegger" that comes up.  (MIS used to be branded Scheidegger MIS.)  MIS denied that it was running a scam and argued that this snippet search result was defamatory, and that Google, as the engine producing such a result, was liable for it.   read more »

CBS News is reporting that downloading or watching the peephole video of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews walking around naked in a hotel room is a crime:

"The Early Show" spoke with CBS News Legal Analyst Lisa Bloom, who said downloading or watching the nude Erin Andrews video is illegal.

"Its like buying or selling stolen property," said Bloom. "If you know you are buying something that was stolen... you could be liable criminally and civilly." (Source)   read more »

It seems all I can write about these days is digital doppelgangers. I’ve written about employers engaged in Facebook hijacking and MySpace lurking. Today, a story of brandjacking through Twitter sabotage rounds out the cyber-possession trilogy.

Ghost writing on Twitter is nothing new.  When you tweet with 50 Cent or Britney, you are communicating with a publicist. This just seems to come with the territory of celebrity communication. Maybe that is why most people derided the story of Tony LaRussa’ s suit against Twitter in reaction to a malicious ghost-tweeter.   read more »

One common criticism lodged by constructionist judges against some of their judicial brethren is that, in their quest for “fair” results, they often misinterpret or outright ignore the plain text of a statute.  The majority of a Tenth Circuit panel seems to have fallen into this trap in a recent case involving section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“Section 230”), despite the admonitions of a fellow panel member in a carefully constructed concurrence.

Section 230 immunizes an interactive computer service (ICS) from liability as "the publisher or speaker" of any information provided by another information content provider (ICP). 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1).  Section 230 defines an ICP as one who "is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided." 47 U.S.C. § 230(f)(3).   read more »

Earlier this month, the United States House of Representatives passed H.R. 2765, an amendment to Title 28 of the US Code that would “prohibit recognition and enforcement of foreign defamation judgments.”  The bill goes beyond H.R. 6146, which passed through the House last year in a number of ways (elucidated below).  Both bills were introduced by Rep. Steven Cohen.   read more »

Back in May, the CMLP joined Public Citizen, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in submitting an amicus curiae brief in support of Yahoo!'s petition for rehearing in the Barnes v. Yahoo! case.  On Monday, we got some good news when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order amending its previous decision.   read more »

From the we-aren't-making-this-up-department:

Johnny I. Henry, an inventor of the vibrating toilet seat, filed a lawsuit last week against Google, Inc. and AOL, claiming that search results delivered by Google and hosted by AOL are defamatory.  In his pro se complaint, Henry, who is African-American, asserts that Google's search results include links to, and snippets of text from, sites that contain pictures of him with captions containing a racial epithet. 

Had Henry chosen to use Google with the SafeSearch preference set to "Use strict filtering," he wouldn't have seen the sites and been offended. That's because the sites in question appear to host sexual content. "Safe Search currently applies to sexual content only, not to racial epithets," explained a Google official in an e-mail.  

Henry's lawsuit will almost certainly be dismissed pursuant to section 230 of the Communications Decency, which protects search and service providers like Google and AOL from liability for content created by third parties.

You can follow further developments in this case, which likely won't last long, by checking out our legal threats database entry, Henry v. Google. 

Today, a federal district court in South Carolina issued a consent order temporarily restraining South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster from "initiating or pursuing any prosecution against craigslist or its officers and employees in relation to content posted by third parties on craigslist's website." The order specifies that it is issued "by agreement of the parties." It will remain in place until the court rules on the merits of craigslist's claims. Craigslist sued McMaster on Wednesday, claiming that his threats to prosecute the company and its executives over user-submitted content violate its statutory and constitutional rights.

Yesterday, Yahoo! filed a petition for rehearing in Barnes v. Yahoo!, a case in which the Ninth Circuit recently held that Cecilia Barnes could pursue a promissory estoppel claim against Yahoo! based on an employee's promise to take down a false profile, notwithstanding the immunity for interactive computer services in section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. (See posts by Eric Goldman, Marc Randazza, and Concurring Opinions for details on the decision.) 

Yahoo!'s petition doesn't seek reconsideration of the main substantive holding on promissory estoppel and Section 230; rather, it asks the Ninth Circuit to revisit dicta in the opinion indicating that, as an affirmative defense, Section 230 cannot be raised on a motion to dismiss. The court said that, instead, an interactive computer service wrongly sued for user-submitted content despite the protection in Section 230 should file an answer and a "motion for judgment on the pleadings."   read more »

Tired of being bullied by South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, craigslist is going on the offensive.  CEO Jim Buckmaster announced on the craigslist blog today that that craigslist is suing McMaster in South Carolina federal court, seeking "declaratory relief and a restraining order with respect to criminal charges he has repeatedly threatened against craigslist and its executives."    read more »