Bloggers win libel protection
By The Associated Press
07.03.03
SAN FRANCISCO ? A federal appeals court has extended the
First Amendment protections of do-it-yourself online
publishers.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals ruled 2-1 that online publishers can post material
generated by others without liability for its content ?
unlike traditional news media, which are held responsible
for such information.
"It clarifies the existing law," said Eric Brown, who
represented the defendant in the suit. "It expands it in
the sense that no court had really addressed bloggers, list
serve operators and those people yet, certainly not on the
level of the 9th Circuit Court."
Blogs, short for Weblogs, are online diaries updated
frequently by tech-savvy writers who use the medium to
comment on current events and everyday life.
Online publishers and free-speech advocates lauded the
panel's decision.
"The decision is a real victory for free speech," said
Jeralyn Merritt, a lawyer and blogger who manages
talkleft.com, a Web site about crime-related news and
politics. "Now we can publish information we receive from
someone else without fear of getting sued."
Merritt said it would be impossible to monitor the nearly
200 messages posted on her site every day.
"I can't be responsible for the content of those comments,"
she said.
The decision recently was the most discussed topic
according to Daypop.com, a current events search engine
that crawls the Web and reflects its collective conscience,
identifying the topics that are generating the most
interest in the blogging world.
The June 24 decision was based on the 1996 Communications
Decency Act, Brown said.
Other cases have said commercial service providers on the
Internet are not responsible for information posted by a
third party. And this decision says noncommercial Web site
hosts are only liable when they post information that a
reasonable person would have known wasn't meant to be
published.
This case involved a North Carolina handyman, Robert Smith,
who said he'd overheard a lawyer, Ellen Batzel, say she was
the descendent of a top Nazi politician. Smith said Batzel
also had what looked like old European paintings in her
house.
Smith e-mailed Ton Cremers, who runs the Museum Security
Network, sharing his suspicion that the paintings in
Batzel's house were looted Nazi goods. Cremers' Web site
tries to find stolen artwork by sending information to
museums and law enforcement personnel.
Cremers posted Smith's e-mail to his listserve ? and Batzel
saw it.
She disputed the claims, sued Smith, Cremers and the Museum
Security Network for defamation, and won.
Cremers appealed, and the panel majority found that "a
service provider or user is immune from liability when a
third person or entity that created or developed the
information in question furnished it to the provider or
user under circumstances in which a reasonable person in
the position of the service provider would conclude that
the information was provided for publication on the
Internet."
The case has been sent back to the trial court to determine
whether the operator should have known the information was
not intended for online publication.
It was significant that even though Cremers made minor
edits to Smith's message, he was still entitled to the
immunity, said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit concerned with
the protection of digital rights.
"It was a reaffirmation of this trend in other cases," said
Tien. "You don't have to be a passive conduit to have this
protection."
The decision is a relief for bloggers and other online
publishers.
"We write for the enjoyment of it," said Merritt. "If we
would get sued, I'm not sure it would be worth it."
==
King Morpheous wrote:
> The decision is a relief for bloggers and other online
> publishers.
>
This is valid law only in 9th Circuit, and although suggestive does not
bind the rest of the US. It's not all that uncommon for circuits to
disagree on controversial issues, consider how the 5th Circuit ruled on
affirmative action, and how that holding differed from what the Supreme
Ct just held on the same topic.