Slashdot Mirror
It's Hard To Run a Blog In Sweden
mpawlo writes "Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt is being investigated by a prosecutor because of his blog. In a blog post, Mr. Bildt states that some 13.000 comments are posted (Swedish link) on his blog and that he and his staff try to erase all inappropriate comments. However, they apparently missed a comment proposing genocide of Palestinians. This prompted a Swedish leftist blogger to report the conservative foreign minister's blog and the comment to the authorities. Now a prosecutor is looking into the matter and the foreign minister will likely be held responsible for the comments due to poor Swedish legislation on freedom of speech relative to the Internet."
So apparently Sweden has the same problems with blogs and web-boards as Germany. Over here the
blog/board owner can be held responsible for any offensive/illegal content posted by someone on
the discussion board or comments. Even if the owner isn't aware of any such posting. This is called
"disturbance liability". If he is sued and agrees to remove the incriminating content there are some
stiff financial penalties if the poster is continuing.
Some courts think it is technically possible to monitor a web-board with 200k comments per month
like http://heise.de/