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Publishing Now Counts As Now

Posted by timothy on from the imagine-the-alternative dept.

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."

2 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Determining the posting date by SpatchMonkey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  2. Interesting with regard to my DMCA threats... by Tom7 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. ;)