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Judges Rule Raped Woman Can Sue 'Enabling' Web Site (vice.com)
Web sites that matched models to photographers also led dozens of women to a pair of rapists in 2011, according to Vice. "Civil court documents show that the owners of Model Mayhem knew about the first wave of rapes but failed to issue a warning to users," Vice reported last summer. Facebook, Craigslist, and Tumblr filed briefs in support of the "Model Mayhem" site, arguing that allowing women to sue them could create a new "failure to warn" liability for other web sites.
But now AmiMoJo writes:In a decision that one day could have reverberations across the internet, a three-judge panel in California decided she can sue the Model Mayhem site that the pair used to lure their victims. "Congress has not provided an all purpose get-out-of-jail-free card for businesses that publish user content on the Internet," Judge Richard Clifton wrote in the panel's decision.
The CDA traditionally exempts web sites from liability for anything their users post. Do Slashdot readers think there should ever be any exceptions?
WTF are you talking about? False rape reports are a tiny percent of rapes reported. And the number of actual rapes not reported is quite high as well.
No. That is not the standard. This is:
DUTY OF CARE OF PROPRIETOR OF BUSINESS
The proprietor of a business establishment owes a duty of care to customers when they come upon the business premises at the proprietor's express or implied invitation. This duty of care requires the proprietor to exercise reasonable care to discover whether accidental, negligent or intentionally harmful acts of third persons are occurring or are likely to occur on the business premises. If a proprietor knows, or should know that such acts are occurring or are likely to occur, the proprietor has the further duty to either give the customer a warning adequate to enable the visitor to avoid the harm, or otherwise to protect the visitor against such harm.
This has nothing to do with aiding the criminal activity. This has very little to do with whether they had specific knowledge of crimes. This has to do with whether they invested reasonable effort into determining whether a risk was likely to be present, and warned their customers of the risk. If someone suggest that something like that might have been going on, then for various values of might (with a threshold between more likely than not and lottery odds), they very well could be liable.
Well I suppose the weekly world news is out of business so no more batboy or doctors resurrect Lincoln stories
http://www.businessinsurance.c...
Anyway there is an article from a source that is actually in the business of informing their readers.
Lavont Flanders Jr. and Emerson Callum were using Model Mayhem to identify targets for a rape scheme, allegedly as early as 2006, according to the ruling. They browsed profiles on Model Mayhem posted by models, contacted potential victims with fake identities posing as talent scouts, and lured the victims to south Florida for bogus modeling auditions, according to the ruling. When a victim arrived, they used a date rape drug to put her in a semicatatonic state, raped her and recorded the activity on videotape for sale and distribution as pornography, according to the ruling.
There's who, what and when, how, why. The firm is in Florida, the model from Brooklyn going to guess the attorney was shopping for the craziest jurisdiction he could find to get this to move forward.
And here is the theory of liability
Jane Doe's claim is different, however,” says the ruling. She does not seek to hold Internet Brands liable as a 'publisher or speaker' of content posted on the Model Mayhem website, or for Internet Brands' failure to remove content posted on the website. Flanders and Callum are not alleged to have posted anything themselves.”
“Instead, Jane Doe attempts to hold Internet Brands liable for failing to warn her about how third parties targeted and lured victims through Model Mayhem” said the ruling.
So three judges in California decided that not telling women that hooking up with strange men through the internet could be dangerous is sufficient to sue for negligence. Why not, we have to tell people plastic bags are not toys and pose a suffocation risk.,
We didn't prosecute Hitler. He killed himself.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
I'm a photographer, my fiance is a model who also runs a "watchdog" group about creepy/seedy people in the industry. In one instance, there was a convicted sex offender who other models apart of her group reported on about several instances where he was crossing the line. She reported his model mayhem profile to the site, along with the link to his conviction on a government website; and they treated her like shit, refused to take any action, removed her profile when she complained about how shitty and dense they were being. It wasn't until she publicly blogged about it, with screenshots of the email chain, that they started singing a different tune, and restored her profile and deleted the sex offenders.
This was just last year. Not to mention the mysterious disappearances linked to the model mayhem site a year or two before that. Most models I have worked with have a creepy/rapey vibe story that starts with Model Mayhem. And by all accounts, they do not take any user reporting seriously.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/modeling-networking-site-common-denominator-disappearance-colorado-women-reports-article-1.1278375
http://www.abc17news.com/news/modeling-website-linked-to-disappearances-rape-and-human-trafficking/20037496
If the newspaper knew the guy posting the ad was using it to lure victims, they too would be liable.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Please note that all we have here is a judge ruling that they CAN sue, not that the website is liable. All that has happened is that their lawyer made an argument that the judge agrees would be the basis for the website being liable. Now, the lawyer has to prove that the website is indeed liable. Having read the summary and the comments it appears to me that there is a basis for suing the website. Now they have to prove in a court of law that the website knew that it was being used by a rapist to lure victims and chose to take no actions. It appears from some of the comments made here that the website was not only not warning the models but actively trying to silence others who were attempting to warn potential victims (key word in that statement is "appears").
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Lawyer here. Doesn't matter. The website is the agent of the model and therefore owes a fiduciary duty to the principal(the model) to not place itself in a position where its interests conflict with those of the principal.
Here they placed their interest in making money ahead of the models' interests in not being raped. Since they had notice that there was a reasonable likelihood that their models were being raped, then by proceeding to accept models' money while not warning them, they were in clear violation of this duty.
That's just the agency law theory. There are plenty of other negligence theories applicable here as well, including plain vanilla negligence that need not even implicate the enhanced duties of care presented in business and agency relationships.