GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat

crush writes, "An Irish website RateYourSolicitor.com, which aims to let clients find and rate solicitors (a British Isles flavor of lawyer), has received an Irish High Court injunction to remove defamatory material about one such rated solicitor. The site is hosted by a US provider, gmax.net, which has reportedly been served notice by lawyers acting for the defamed solicitor. According to the article, GoDaddy, as the domain name registrar, has locked access to the site (registration or bugmenot required). (Amusingly, the records are all for a 'John Smith' in the Russian Federation at 'lawyercatcher@lawyer.com'!) An interesting twist to all of this is that according to the Communications Decency Act, an ISP, as a publisher, cannot be held responsible or legally liable for what their clients do. So how can GoDaddy justify this censorship? Or are registrars the weak link in a system that seems like it ought to be robust against censorship?"

Comments

WHOIS

[DrunkenTerror]

Registrant:
John Smith
krasnaya ploschad
Moskva 00000
Russian Federation

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: RATEYOURSOLICITOR.COM
Created on: 02-Jul-05
Expires on: 02-Jul-10
Last Updated on: 15-Jul-05

Administrative Contact:
Smith, John lawyercatcher@lawyer.com
krasnaya ploschad
Moskva 00000
Russian Federation
714987650

Technical Contact:
Smith, John lawyercatcher@lawyer.com
krasnaya ploschad
Moskva 00000
Russian Federation
714987650

Domain servers in listed order:
PARK13.SECURESERVER.NET
PARK14.SECURESERVER.NET

Registry Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Registry Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Status: clientRenewProhibited

Re:Not a surprise

[Mike Myatt]

I like a good lawyer joke just like anyone else, but lawyers in and of themselves are not the problem. There are good and bad service providers within any sector, so why should the legal sector be held to a higher standard? The reality is that there are glitches in the legal system and many people don't understand how to manage the legal process. For more insight into this issue you can read "The Truth About Lawyers" http://www.n2growth.com/blog/?p=12?

Re:Censorship by any other name...

[Tanktalus]

Side note: "your" freedom of speech is one predicated on government involvement. Specifically, the lack therein. It does not, however, compel a newspaper to print your article or letter to the editor. It merely prevents the government (in theory) deciding for the newspaper that it won't. The newspaper is still free to deny your article for any reason, whether trivial (it spelled "its" wrong) or conspiratorial ("for the common good").

Similarly, ISPs are free to restrict who gets to use their service. (Of course, there are other repercussions here - if they take an overtly active role in this, for example, they lose common-carrier status, and thus become liable for everything, where "overtly" and "active" are loosely defined based on case law.) If GoDaddy doesn't want to provide service to pornographers or spammers, that's their business. If GoDaddy has a weak stomach for lawsuits, that, too, is their business. However, even if they do have a strong stomach for lawsuits, their TOS says that they reserve the right to make decisions to terminate service unilaterally based on their perception of the lawsuit. The "with or without merit" part is simply a cover-your-ass statement that says that you and they could even disagree about the winnability of a lawsuit, but they still get to make the call. That's there just because someone got sued at some point in the past for doing something like capitulating over what turned out to be nothing, I'm sure.

So, please. Do not bring up freedom of speech. Your constitutional amendment to that effect is irrelevant. At least to this situation.

(Disclaimer: nothing in here says you are wrong for disliking GoDaddy. Just as you're free to express your view, I am mine. I'm not preventing you from blaming free speech - just trying to explain it a bit more.)

Re:"British"?

[eiscir]

Where're you from mate? 'British Isles' is purely a geographical description - it includes all the islands off the northwest coast of Europe, the largest of which is called Britain. Makes sense to me, as an Irishman, to call them the British Isles then! However, if the /. had said 'A British flavour of lawyer', that would necessarily involve a political or ethnic implication, which would of course be incorrect. The wikipedia has an interesting article about the correct terminology here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Isles_(termin ology). However, unfortunately it seems that Irish-America has got to it in places, making it seem that Irish people are far more puffed up about the term 'British Isles' than they really are. Needs a bit of editing, methinks.

GoDaddy, cowardice, and non-free speech.

[mbauser2]

I worked in GoDaddy's tech support department for a little while many years ago. They struck me as a little spineless when it comes to real controversy (as opposed to the manufactured controversy of some of their ads). GoDaddy's AUP is a lot tougher than their competitors, giving them permission to yank a domain for saying the wrong thing.

Check out this excerpt from their Registration Agreement:

Go Daddy may also cancel the registration of a domain name, after thirty (30) days, if that name is being used, as determined by Go Daddy in its sole discretion, in association with spam or morally objectionable activities. Morally objectionable activities will include, but not be limited to: activities designed to defame, embarrass, harm, abuse, threaten, slander or harass third parties; activities prohibited by the laws of the United States and/or foreign territories in which You conduct business; activities designed to encourage unlawful behavior by others, such as hate crimes, terrorism and child pornography; activities that are tortious, vulgar, obscene, invasive of the privacy of a third party, racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable; activities designed to impersonate the identity of a third party; and activities designed to harm or use unethically minors in any way.

It's not exactly a free-speech-friendly contract, is it? You can lose your registration for embarrassing someone. This is why I never moved any of my domains to GoDaddy when I was working for them. You can't count on them to stay out of legal battles that other registrars would ignore. Instead, they'll kill your registration, and expect to be patted on the back for being good citizens.

Sometimes, I think their real problem is that they want everyone to like them.

Re:GoDaddy, cowardice, and non-free speech.

[LBt1st]

I've been on the shit end of that stick. Not only are they quick to pull your domain/site, but then they expect $200 and a written apology even if you didn't do what they claimed you did to get your domain back. I now refer people away from GoDaddy. And it's quite a lot of people.

Re:Go Daddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat

[crush]

Ireland is not in the U.K. so the laws there have absolutely no bearing on this situation. It is my understanding that the Irish fought against British occupation for several centuries and then topped it off with a war from 1916 to 1922. There's a good new movie out called The Wind that Shakes the Barley about it.

So, a better question might be, are US hosted websites and registrars under the control of Irish courts? I don't understand how an Irish court ruling makes any difference to a US company. What other countries' courts exercise legal control over US ISPs and registrars?

gmax.net didn't (as I understand it) create the content. They just host the website whose content is presumably created in Ireland, so the Comm.Dec.Act should apply. It's not gmax.net's legal obligation, nor presumably is it GoDaddy's. It's just that GoDaddy apparently will pull the plug on us as soon as someone even threatens to sue!

From digging around a bit more I see that there's a companion website called CrookedLawyers.com put out by people called "Victims of the Legal Profession".

Re:Sites that require registration

[crush]

It was the only source for the story which a friend in Ireland sent to me. I looked around for other sources but couldn't find one. I take your point though. Here's a copy of the story which is (c) Irish Independent

AN American domain name provider has suspended access to the controversial rateyoursolicitor.com website after an Irish High Court issued a court order to remove offensive material about a barrister from the site. Godaddy.com, an award winning internet site, suspended access to the rateyoursolicitor.com portal within 24 hours of an injunction issued by Judge Michael Hanna. Last Wednesday, Judge Hanna issued an order that defamatory material posted about Jayne Maguire, a barrister, on rateyoursolicitor.com must be removed with immediate effect. Ms Maguire has claimed that John Gill, of Drumline, Newmarket on Fergus, defamed her by posting offensive remarks on rateyoursolicitor.com. Mr Gill, chairman of the Victims of the Legal Profession Society, denied that anything concerning Ms Maguire was published or posted on the site. Ms Maguire is seeking damages for defamation and privacy and an interlocutory injunction of the statements about her on the site which she says is administered by Mr Gill. Godaddy.com have locked access to the site domain name until High Court proceedings are concluded. Lawyers acting for Ms Gill served notice on www.gmax.net, an American Internet Service Provider that is host to the site. It had been thought that Godaddy.com was hosting the site which invites Irish people to rate their lawyers, however gmax.net has now been identified as the ISP and has received notice of the High Court proceedings. Dearbhail McDonald

The price of phony domain registration

[Animats]

The owner of that domain is listed as

John Smith
krasnaya ploschad
Moskva 00000
Russian Federation
714987650
lawyercatcher@lawyer.com

("krasnaya ploschad" is Red Square, the big plaza in front of the Kremlin.)

Ordinarily, faced with obnoxious registrar behavior, you can transfer the domain to another registrar. Given this phony domain registration info, thus domain owner can't do that.

That's the price of phony domain registration info - any trouble, and you lose the domain.

DNS Registrar free speech zone

[CustomDesigned]

OpenNIC is an alternative DNS root that does not depend on such corporations. Registering a non-ICANN toplevel domain under an opennic registrar would be good insurance against this kind of thing. Even going strictly with ICANN, registering more than one top level domain under different registrars is good insurance.

(-1, Wrong)

[El Long]

The Republic Of Ireland (Eire) is in fact part of the British Isles. The British Isles consists of Great Britain and Ireland. It is not part of the United Kingdom. This confusion seems to come up a lot.

Re:Go Daddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat

[tbjw]

With all due respect, and I happen to know something about this, the name of the state is Ireland. It is commonly called the Republic of Ireland in order to prevent the state (ROI) being confused with the island (Ireland). The name is 'Ireland' in English & 'Éire' in Irish. It's in the constitution.

Re:Don't you get it?

[Travoltus]

Try that in my town. They'll round you up faster than you can say "whoops."

I drive around here every day. No fliers anywhere, except a few staked signs during election time. The ones that do go up, get taken down within a day. I actually timed it once for an unbelieving in-law.