Are Tech Firms Liable For What Their Users Post? (mercurynews.com)

Thursday Texas police officers arrested the CEO of Backpage.com, a web site allowing escorts to post classified ads, on a felony charge accusing him of pimping. Slashdot reader whoever57 writes: It is likely that the charges will not stick because of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, under which publishers are protected from liability for the postings of their users. However, this could just be the first shot in the battle to weaken section 230. This could endanger other sites, such as Craigslist, and ultimately, any site with user-written content.
Backpage calls the prosecution "frivolous," arguing that the site's classified ads for escorts are protected by the First Amendment. But a law professor at the University of Santa Clara suggests prosecutors may argue that the site had been "optimized to facilitate online prostitution ads," establishing some level of complicity.

Comments

Covered this already

[Anonymous Coward]

This already made the rounds at Ars. The current spat has nothing to do with Section 230. The warrant states that BackPages was complicit in editing ads to hide their illegality befor posting. That makes them complicit. Section 230 won't protect you if you edit the stuff your users post.

Anyway, the formal charges are here. Pimping is defied in teh CA Penal Code as profiting off of someone else's prostitution. I'd like to note that further reading of the Ars thread brings to light that things like Overt Act 9 are not nebulous "some child", but rather, that they have children who are testifying.

tl;dr: this is about section 230. This is about a company taking an active role in prostitution and sex trafficking.

Re:Shouldn't involve the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's one: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7024930/