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EU Court Holds News Website Liable For Readers' Comments
angry tapir writes "Seven top European Union judges have ruled that a leading Internet news website is legally responsible for offensive views posted by readers in the site's comments section. The European Court of Human Rights found that Estonian courts were within their rights to fine Delfi, one of the country's largest news websites, for comments made anonymously about a news article, according to a judgment."
Now we can insult ourselves with anonymous posts and then sue the posting site for 500$.
Nospam007 you are moron!
Ooops, forgot to click the 'Post anonymously' checkbox.
This is not EU law, it is the ECHR which relates to the Convention on Human Rights - a separate body from the EU...
Apparently it isn't just our appellate courts here in the States that have gone batshit crazy. The insanity seems to be spreading.
It shouldn't matter who made the comments. Even if the site themselves posted the shit on purpose, "Offensive views" should be protected speech.
The "European Court of Human Rights" doesn't seem to give a damn about Human Rights.
Oh - I think they meant 'the truth', which is not allowed to be posted on the internet...
From the article:
In other words, the EU allows its nations to finetune their own interpretation of freedom of speech within certain boundaries and it ruled that the Estonian law does not violate those boundaries. This is a good thing as every country and culture values the balance of rights differently.
And nothing of value will be lost.
I tried to find not premoderated comments on any of EU officials blogs to give them a taste, no luck :(
But look what I've found, granma that's responsible for EU's 'digital agenda' (WTF is that?) wants our views on what she calls 'Internet governance'. http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/content/internet-governance-i-want-your-views
I have some choice words for these judges.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
If comments are bad for science, why shouldn't they be bad for everyone else?
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/10/02/2059238/do-comments-on-web-pages-ruin-science
I've seen many news web sites, in France, that shut down the comment feature in advance for articles about subjects usually prone to racist or antisemitic comments.
I have mixed feelings about this kind of limitations, they look like full preventive cencoreship.
Sometimes they can resort to manual comment moderation for this type of subject.
There is a gap in free speech the difference between opinion and false statement of fact. The US is currently one of the few countries that maintains a distorted view of the difference and how it counts against libel and slander. In Europe couching the forums as being only the "Opinions" of commentators and not statements of fact and continually reinforcing that concept of opinions over statements of facts, gives a great degree of protection. Of course it is still far more sensible to review comments at regular intervals and delete inappropriate ones, this policy can be clearly stated along with comment review schedule. It is never slander if it is in fact your opinion at the time of making the statement and your statement was made in the form of an opinion.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I didn't know Neelie's a grandmother. She does promote a lot of sensible things though - definitely gets marks for trying.
Does not it make it kinda even more difficult to operate discussion forum, or IRC channel, or, I dare say, anonymous imageboard like 4chan? By what logic operator may be held liable for user's postings? If unidentified person offended other person in, say, supermarket - would supermarket owner be held liable? Operator may be forced to delete offending content by court order, or at least as with DCMA complaints - by the letter from offended person, that's understandable. But to hold operator liable for user's postings - means say farewell to any forms of discussions on the internet, except where user posted content is premoderated or user have to somehow authorise with his real identity.
Yes she does seems to promote sensible things and seems to understand what's going on. Comparing to our Russian counterparts that just add new topics to be included in firewall 'DROP' list in order to protect 'children' and rights holders - very very sensible.
Looks like us sane peole should start emulating the Napoli football fans who recently staged a protest for the right to be insulted by Milan fans after said fans were banned from their own stadium for "offensive language".
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/09/italian-football-fans-abuse-milan-napoli
Fuck all these whiny pussies who want to turn the world into some sort of cotton swaddled PC playgrond for retards.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
A very interesting piece of info is at the bottom of TFA:
since readers were allowed to make comments without registering their names, the identity of the authors would have been extremely difficult to establish. Making Delfi legally responsible for the comments was therefore practical, said the court. It was also reasonable, because the news portal received commercial benefit from comments being made.
The EU needs to fine itself for being idiots and then disband.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
As long as the comments are clearly delineated from editorial content, I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to hold the paper responsible for the content of the comments. (Not to mention that holding a newspaper liable under human rights laws for "offensive" speech would be laughed out of nearly any court in the US. That wouldn't stop some clowns from trying, or a particularly brain-addled judge from occasionally issuing an injunction, but it'd never stick.)
Yes, the comments of many news websites are worthless cesspools of scum and villainy. But there's better ways to prevent that than holding newspapers legally liable for comment content.
Oh right, it's Europe, so you're not personally responsible, you can socialize the risk.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
This sounds terrible... But it gets worse, also look at it this way: this is yet another way to tailor the news if the news provider can be penalized for reporting the news ... "The E.U. court decided that it was proportionate because, given the nature of the article, Delfi should have expected offensive posts ..."
consider the source
This is a horrible summary (or more precisely, the first sentence of it is). First of all, the judgement in the case Delfi AS v. Estiona was handed down by the European Court of Human Rights, which is not a court of the European Union, but exists to adjudicate the European Convention on Human Rights, and violations thereof. Almost all European Countries, including the non-EU ones, are signatories to the convention and thus have agreed to abide by the court's judgement. But that's just international law, not EU law (though the EU also requires accession to the ECHR for membership).
Second, the court did not rule that a website is legally responsible for the statements its users make. The court does not even have the power to make this determination. It only ruled that the national law of Estonia, which under certain circumstances allowed websites to be held liable for what their users said, as applied in this case, was not a disproportionate response incompatible with article 10 of the ECHR (freedom of expression, a.k.a. freedom of speech).
The press release summarizing the judgement is here. The judgement itself appears to not be online yet.
What I've said to the admins and owners of intensely partisan websites for years is that lieu of fanatically deleting comments they don't like and banning readers just because they disagree with them - why not put all their comments behind a paywall? That way only the nutcases they love would be sufficiently motivated to pay them for the 'freedom' to a be nutcase with all their other nutcases and the nutcases are less likely to stumble across someone who butthurts their delicate sensibilities at all.
Get your thoughts into paper and contact/join a party like UKIP
So UKIP is opposed to the European Convention on Human Rights?
Interesting...
Well then, I guess Walmart will be liable for the mean things I say to fat people while they are in my way with. That would be the analog version of this insanity, no?
The European Court of Human Rights are a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
.. that's cunt not coon .. etc ...
What about my Human Right to post abuse about our dear leaders, Obama is a cunt
Clearly, the people reading such comments are the ones responsible for them; othewise the poster wouldn't make the effort.
It is a badly written article. We don't know why the site was required to pay damages.
The article says it was for offensive, but also defamatory, and threatening posts. Posting defamatory posts have always been illegal. If the site was sued for defamatory posts that the site refused to remove, then this is nothing new.
critical difference - the burden of proof is very heavy for nebulous stuff like "knew" and "harm to reputation".
Here is the actual rulling rather than a paraphrased version. The important bit follows;
In assessing this question, the Court assessed four key issues. First, the context of the posts. The comments had been insulting, threatening and defamatory. Given the nature of the article, the company should have expected offensive posts, and exercised an extra degree of caution so as to avoid being held liable for damage to an individual’s reputation.
Second, the steps taken by Delfi to prevent the publication of defamatory comments. The article’s webpage did state that the authors of comments would be liable for their content, and that threatening or insulting comments were not allowed. The webpage also automatically deleted posts that contained a series of vulgar words, and users could tell administrators about offensive comments by clicking a single button, which would then lead to the posts being removed. However, the warnings failed to prevent a large number of insulting comments from being made, and they were not removed in good time by the automatic-word filtering or by the notice-and-take-down notification system.
Third, whether the actual authors of the comments could have been made liable for them. The owner of the ferry company could, in principle, have attempted to sue the specific authors of the offensive posts rather than Delfi. However, the identity of the authors would have been extremely difficult to establish, as readers were allowed to make comments without registering their names. Therefore many of the posts were anonymous. Making Delfi legally responsible for the comments was therefore practical; but it was also reasonable, because the news portal received commercial benefit from comments being made.
Finally, the court addressed the consequences of Delfi being made liable. The sanctions imposed by the Estonian courts against the company had been fairly small. Delfi was required to pay a EUR 320 fine, and the courts did not make any orders about how the portal should protect third party rights in the future in a way that might limit free speech.
Taking into account all of these points, the Court held that making Delfi liable for the comments was a justified and proportionate interference with its right to freedom of expression. There had therefore been no violation of Article 10.
I recommend wargaming. If you need to take it over, first step is finding it. Next thing you know, you know where everything is. Or your bad at taking over the world.
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the three goobers swallowed by first the CCCP, and then N.A.Z.I Germany, and then the CCCP again. Sucked to be them for a long time.
Estonia is also the home of Piotr Skut!
What is "truly in appropriate"? My mom and I would have different opinions. That is the crux of the argument. Estonia's solution is that the offended person gets to decide, which is pretty inappropriate.
It is a ruling happening in a different part of the world based on laws different from your part of the world
So whose law should apply when an EU-based viewer discovers that a US-based site violates the defamation law of one or more EU countries, even though the site complies with US libel law?
I got kinda heated when I first saw this but now I am 100% in support of this as long as the fines stay that reasonable. In the United States the courts would usually levy life-ending or business-bankrupting fines for cyber infractions but if the max penalty for trolling was €320 then I really wouldn't care.
Woosh
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
For all we know the commenters could have been in the US, posting on the Estonian news site, and you can pry our Freedoms out of our cold dead nuclear-enabled superpower hands.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You aren't that anonymous. Sorry if you didn't realize that.
(OTOH, all they could really pin you down to is your TCP/IP connection id, so maybe if you quickly shut down TCP and flush the connection it will be snarfed up by someone else.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
And now.. I also legally speak for everyone here when I say... "Fuck That"
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Good explanation.
"... no brainer..."
No, it is very smart. It demonstrates that the law is illogical.
Suppose an anonymous person posts a comment on a web site hosted in an island nation with no libel law. Suppose the web site hosting is paid for by anonymous contributions from people who visit the site.
It's easy to find situations like that in which there is no one to sue.
No regime appreciates people who can think out of the box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias
Casteism
Wait a minute: by being called a "newspaper", a website is magically transformed from a place that should be able to post comments at will to a place that should ruthlessly police them with an iron fist?
Opinion columns/pieces are actively chosen by editorial staff. I don't know of any comments section of any website that has even implied there was any editorial control. No "editor" publishes comments on newspaper websites, no more than Slashdot's editors "publishes" comments here.