Publishing Now Counts As Now

wik writes "The New York Times reports that the statute of limitations for defamation is one year from the date of posting a page on the web. The courts had to decide whether the posting date or the last download date of a web page constitutes the publication date."

Comments

Determining the posting date

[SpatchMonkey]

They're going to have a bit of a problem determining the posting date, as the date header in the http response can quite easily be forged.

I suppose this is where things like Google cache and the Wayback archive come in useful, (IANAL) but it seems to me that for them to be trusted, further legislation and rulings would be necessary to give them reliable legal status.

And, like, what if someone hacked them? These things need to be considered!

Interesting with regard to my DMCA threats...

[Tom7]

You guys might remember the DMCA Threats I received over my program embed (for TrueType fonts). I think this case has some interesting consequences for my fight, because I published my program in 1997 and haven't modified the page since. 1997 was before the DMCA became law. If in fact that publishing was found to be the only act of "trafficking", then they would not be able to sue me because of the ban on ex post facto laws in the constitution.

Of course, that defense is much weaker than the dozens of other reasons why their threats are totally stupid. ;)

How would I know?

[martyb]

How would I know when I have been defamed (or slandered, libeled, etc.)?

Do I have to Google myself?
I've lived a full life, so far. Attended college. Worked at a number of high-tech companies. Participated in several civic organizations. Traveled in Europe. Though I've tried not to, I'm sure I've ticked some people off along the way.

Now let's imagine that one of my former acquaintences gets a computer, creates a personal web page, and still holding a grudge, defames me on their web site.

My name is relatively uncommon, yet Google found well over 600 pages with my name on it (I didn't even know I'd been to Antarctica! =)... and that's for just one form of my name (First name, Last Name); I'm sure there'd be more if I searched for other variants (e.g. "Marty" instead of "Martin", include middle name, common misspellings of my last name, etc.) I would need to examine every one of these pages to see if any defamatory material had been published.

• How often would I need to repeat this task? Monthly?
• What if it were not indexed by Google, but WAS indexed by AltaVista?
• How many different search engines must I search to make sure I didn't miss anything?
• What if my name were "John Smith"? (Google reports about 336,000 matches!)
• What if the attack were in a language in which I am not fluent? (e.g.: Spanish, Russian, or Hebrew.)
• What if the attack appeared on Usenet instead of the world wide web?
• What if the attack were presented as a GIF image whose "contents" were text."

Consider, too, what happens if my career path changes so that I came to have a highly-visibile role as, say, a CEO, Senator, recognized industry expert, or talk-show host? Far more references to my name that I'd have to search for defamation. Ditto if I were a witness to a gruesome crime or accident.

In the past, publication was difficult and required relatively large amounts of money (for the printing press, book binding machine, etc.) and specialized expertise (e.g. typesetting). That is no longer the case. The first liberating step was desktop publishing; now there's the World Wide Web. What will another 10 or 20 years bring? Consider a groundswell of interest in weblogs facilitated by text-to-speech web publishing using a cell phone for input.

IMHO, I think the court ruled as best they could in light of the circumstances of this particular case, but I can't help but think there's a far larger problem here that needs to be adressed.