Slashdot Mirror
Blog Faces Lawsuit Over Reader Comments
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "In a legal case being watched closely by bloggers, an Internet company has sued the owner of a blog for comments posted to his site by readers, the Wall Street Journal Online reports. Traffic-Power.com, which sells tools for boosting Web traffic, sued Aaron Wall, age 25, over statements posted in the comments section of Wall's search-engine-optimization blog, SEOBook.com. (Wall also has posted about the case.) 'Legal analysts said the case falls into somewhat murky legal territory, but that Mr. Wall may have some protection from liability under federal law,' WSJ.com says. 'Courts generally have held that the operators of computer message boards and mailing lists cannot be held liable for statements posted by other people. Blogs might be viewed in a similar light, they said.' However, Daniel Perry, a lawyer who has followed the case, says that Wall's case is complicated by his own negative comments about Traffic-Power, which could be seen as a competitor to his site. 'To be candid, he sort of moved into this moving propeller,' Perry said. 'The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people.'"
Because it's the Internet, there are so many permuations of where the server is, who owns the site, and who made the comment, and where all those people live. Certainly, a company needs to do what it can to defend it's name, but I've got to believe it's going to get a LOT harder to do so.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
"The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people."
Actually, that's one of the greatest strengths of the internet. True freedom of speech.
That's the way it was. Unfortunately with the profitability of the Internet as a whole, the U.S. government wants to "own" it and therefore make it follow it's rules... Sadly I don't seeing anyone fighting it.
Get paid to code OSS
Seriously when did people get this idea that you should be able to say whatever you want and never have any consequences? All freedom of speech means is that the Government won't try to stop your (should be political) speech. It doesn't mean you can libel and slander people anonymously consequence free.
Why should you be allowed to go around staring negative rumours about your business competitors? How would you like your boss to lie to a future employer that you got fired for drug abuse or for having kiddie porn?
People want rights but never seem to understand that responsibilities are just as important for the functioning of society.
One of the great problems with the Internet currently is that there are so many anonymous cowards, who troll, spam and lie. There is very little consequence to such actions so people aren't inhibited.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
All right choose the favorable law in this scenario:
Some guy lives in France that doesn't allow hate speech from the stuff that happened in WWII; the guy reads the hate speech deemed illegal in France posited by someone that lived in Russia and the server resides some place in China.
Ok, so we go after that bad guy and got him shutdown (I don't know which bad it was but it is done).
Now the same guy that lives in Russia has very strict pornography laws. He then reads the web site of the guy that read the hate speech (whom is a museum curator) and it has liberal pictures of nudity deemed art in France. However, in Russia it is pornography (just say). Now whom do we go after? Ok so now we have a guy in Russia and a guy in France incarcerated; soon this launches WWIII due to the mess and the world is doomed - problem solved?
"The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people."
You mean, if I were to say this:
"Daniel Perry is a two-bit fucktard who plainly doesn't understand what the Internet is all about. He spreads lies, deceit, and only wants to sue people for their hard-earned money while he accepts fat checks from his clients. What a worm, that guy."
That would mean Slashdot might be held liable in a lawsuit, amiright?
Also, if you're not allowed to make negative comments about people on the Internet, then about 98% of all blogs ever written would be in violation of the law.
this case will revolve around the communications decency act (wikipedia) and the phrase: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
like the article says, this really is still a murky area of the law--tho some decisions (like the Zeran one mentioned) seem to grant immunity, it's not clear whether this law really extends so far. recently there was a case involving eBay and a defamatory comment posted in feedback that went to the CA supreme court.
but, it seems like blogger=user of an interactive computer service (blog software/internet etc.) and post was by another, so you might conclude that the blogger shouldn't be treated as speaker, though it depends a good amount on the interpretation of the clause, since that is pretty broad. But the trade secret issue may tear down any protection from the law, if it's valid.
it seems more intelligent to go after the actual offender, not the host of the comment, but people generally want to go after the bigger fish, and it is often more difficult to track down the actual commenter.
So, honestly, two operators in a dirty business go at each other, my personal feeling is I hope they both go down. It's kind of like two porn sites arguing which has the sluttiest bitches...
truckaxle says:Nice analogy but I don't think it fully applies. There is nothing inherently evil about search engine optimization.
Whoa there truckaxle... are you saying there's something inherently evil about slutty bitches? You've never met *good* slutty bitches? Trust me, they're out there...
Anyway, the analogy doesn't work because when two porn sites argue about who has the sluttiest bitches, they both win- it's called a publicity stunt. By contrast, when two search engine optimization companies sue, someone's going to end up paying a lawyer. So at least one of them is going to lose. That's how it's different.
Of course, what Saeed is really getting at is that he doesn't care. These guys can go screw each other, that's OK with him...
That's because he is going about it the wrong way. Freenet simply is not capable of delivering what he claims its design goals are (and spare me links to fake Chinese dissident's sites please which cannot be accessed by them using the Web). In oppressive countries, as soon as you are found to be using Freenet (i.e. your PC has Freenet packets coming in/out) your ass is crass for "anti-government" activities. You see, there is no "but I am entitled to sending encrypted data!" defense there. So for that purpose, unless some radical stealth system is put in place involving magic and pixie dust, Freenet is useless for these dissidents.
It can be useful in the West, where you do enjoy these rights to privacy (somewhat) but then, instead of fighting for your rights, you are simply giving in and for every encroachement on your freedoms, you simply try to hide deeper in the grasses of the Internet to escape the "man" and his laws. Wrong strategy, because if you keep it up, sooner or later you will find yourself in jail just for having Freenet client installed as the laws become repressive enough to match these less-then-civilized countries of the so called "axis of evil".
Freenet is a curious technological idea but it is completely wrong-headed and impractical, and in fact extremely dangerous to the not-quite-technical-savvy dissidents who might get a false sense of security by trying to use the damn thing and find themselves in the slammer shortly afterwards.
And how do you determine its falseness? Court trial? A trial initiated by, say, a 2 billion dollars a year corp against your basement-dwelling (hypotetically) ass. Result: no freedom of speech whatsoever as the court costs alone will utterly ruin you before you even get to the actual trial proper. For practical example, check out the "RIAA vs. teenagers" circus. Result: no freedom of speech against those powerful enough to shut you up.
I am not sure, but I dont think this is exactly what the founding fathers had in mind. Specially that some of them were great believers in anonymous speech, publishing under pseudonyms themselves. See "Publius".
Any sane justice system would see this case decided in 45 minutes. The blogger is responsible for publishing his own comments; the others are responsible for publishing theirs.
There might be a day or two argument over truth, liability and damages. If the comments are not true, then the people making them in public are liable for any damages proven to be caused by those comments. Not very complicated, and certainly nothing new on which to make arguments about "new Internet technologies" which make this different.
Instead, watch this dispute consume months or years, including many days of scarce, publicly funded justice system labor. Watch lawyers pad their pockets with arguments that go nowhere, probably to arrive at either a backwards precedent, or just a settlement that settles nothing but the exchange of more money between the parties (and even more cuts to their lawyers). This is going to cost all of us even more money, immediately in the costs to the justice system to moderate this debate, probably without any benefit to future cases.
This whole notion that "X changed everything" is the biggest lie of our lifetimes. Even when that's partly true, like Columbus' return from the Western Hemisphere with proof that Europeans should conquer the territory, it changes a lot - but not everything. Like realities of physics, economics, and justice. Other laws, like those written by lawyers and approved by judges, can change, too. But those are usually changed to suit the lawyers, regardless of how they affect the rest of us.
Like saying that public speech on the Internet changes the familiar expectations of public, unmoderated speech and liability. Just like when someone posts slanderous, lying posters on a wall along a busy sidewalk. The building owner isn't liable for the damage caused by the posters, unless they're also the posterer. Likewise, people already know that unmoderated websites aren't responsible for the posts made by the public. All the noise to the contrary is just lawyers making excuses to increas their billings.
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make install -not war
I believe part of the answer lies in editorial control. If you delete comments on your blog, you may be conisderet an editor rather than a common carrier, and become responsible for the content.
Another case is if you refuse to remove illegal material from your blog, when pointed out to you, you may become responsible.
Of course, if you do remove the material, it may be viewer as editorial control, so it is damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
The thing is, many webmaster forums have a thread running, where many former Traffic Power clients explain how they were pressured to sign up, then the work done was poor quality, and eventually Google banned their sites for spamming the search engine results.
Google dropped a very large number of TP client sites out of their search results many months ago. Even "GoogleGuy" (a Google employee who posts at webmasterworld) made comment about it one day, but without specifically naming the company involved.
There is a long string of complaints about TrafficPower already registered with the BBB, and right after that, didn't TP change their name to "1P" or something? Sounds like a company trying to shake off a very bad reputation, to me.
There were no "trade secrets" to divulge. They are all there in the HTML source code of the website, and cross-linking of sites is discoverable with simple searches on the major search engines too.
Law suit is without basis, and should be laughed out of court. Court time would be better spent suing TP on behalf of all their clients that they ripped off over the last few years.