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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...
Exactly!
Nobody should be forced to be thought police.
And who is this that gets to define "offensive"? The person with the weakest skull?
Also I can't help but feel that honest opinions absolutely cannot exist without real anonymity, and so real debate on topics would effectively be squashed.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
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.
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.
That really depends on what you define as a human right, and how it affects other's rights. I do agree with you, but their reasoning was (FTA) "Article 10 of E.U. law allowed freedom of expression to be interfered with by national courts in order to protect a person's reputation." In other words, it's up to the member nation as to what constitutes libel. In the US it's libelous if you know it's not true.
In the US for example, speech isn't 100% free. If something damages somebody's reputation, you better be able to show that you believed it was true or you're on the hook for libel or slander. A lot of other countries have where speech that damages reputation is considered libelous in certain circumstances even if it's true. The comments may or may not be truthful, though it sounds like there was malice behind them, and may or may not have been considered libel in the US or other countries in addition to Estonia. That's not really the big issue here because that's nothing new. The big issue is that the news site was responsible for a comment that somebody else posted. Slippery slope and all.
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
most of TFA:
In January 2006, Delfi published an article about a ferry company's decision to change its routes and thus delay the opening of alternative and cheaper ice roads to certain islands.
Many readers then wrote highly offensive or threatening posts about the ferry operator and its owner. The owner successfully sued Delfi in April 2006 and was awarded €320 (US$433).
Delfi argued that it was not responsible for the comments and that the fine violated E.U. freedom of expression laws. However the judges agreed that Article 10 of E.U. law allowed freedom of expression to be interfered with by national courts in order to protect a person's reputation, as long as the interference was proportionate to the circumstances.
The E.U. court decided that it was proportionate because, given the nature of the article, Delfi should have expected offensive posts and exercised an extra degree of caution.
In addition, the website did not appear to take any proactive steps to remove the defamatory and offensive comments, relying instead on automated word-filtering of certain vulgar terms or notification by users.
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. However, 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.
My takeaway: slope not slippery.
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.
you do not have to show that you believed it was true, they have to show that you knew it was false
You can't publish slander - nasty lies about named persons.
Yes you can; it just needs to have the right context.
You just can't assert it as a matter of fact, but opinion.
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.
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.