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Judges Rule Raped Woman Can Sue 'Enabling' Web Site (vice.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the courts-vs-CDA dept.

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?

3 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. My understanding is this is a negligence case by rsilvergun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The site didn't know exactly who was doing it, but they knew someone was using their service to find victims and intentionally choose not to disclose the fact. The reason the judge let it go through is that there's evidence the company had knowledge of a specific risk and failed to alert the users. That's why common carrier protections didn't cause the case to be thrown out.

    Craigslist has the same issue, and as such they display warnings to users when you respond telling you about common scams.

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  2. How does law work for newspapers? by Lotana · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What if rapists post a modelling job ad in the local newspaper asking for young females. Would the newspaper be liable to be sued?

    I don't believe I ever seen any warnings in the classified sections. Surely this scenario has happened in the past. What is the precedent on those kind of cases?

  3. Re:Model Mayhem is the worst at dealing with this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Oh, and I forgot an important detail of the story. Before they acted on it, they threatened her with legal action if she did not take the blog post down. Claiming that posting the messages were in violation of their TOS. When she didn't budge on from their threats, that's when they decided to actually do something.