A California Supreme Court decision regarding a blogger’s possible defamation liability has ended up serving the First Amendment very well. The court ruled that bloggers and Internet bulletin board groups cannot be sued for defamatory statements made by others due to protections granted under the 1996 Telecom Act.
The background: newsgroup operator Ilena Rosenthal posted a letter written by a man who was critical of a doctor Terry Polevoy. Polevoy sued Rosenthal for libel and a California Court of Appeals ultimately upheld Polevoy’s right to sue Rosenthal, despite the fact that Section 230 of the 96 Act protects Internet publishers from being held liable for harmful comments written by others.
The California Supreme Court turned that decision around, saying that the law is clear, albeit with troubling consequences, and ruled in favor of Rosenthal. EFF and the ACLU participated in this much-watched decision, arguing, among other things, that holding Internet content providers liable for the actions of others could end up chilling speech. “In adopting Section 230, Congress was concerned about the chilling effect that the possibility of tort liability for others’ speech would have on ICS [interactive communications service] providers,” EFF and ACLU wrote in their amicus brief.
The appeals court agreed with Rosenthal that she’s not liable for the alleged defamatory statements regarding Polevoy, but seemed a reluctant defender of how federal law exempts the communications service providers from tort liability.
We acknowledge that recognizing broad immunity for defamatory re-publications on the Internet has some troubling consequences. Until Congress chooses to revise the settled law in this area, however, plaintiffs who contend they were defamed in an Internet posting may only seek recovery from the original source of the statement.
Nonetheless, it’s still a victory for free speech and for now, anyway, a whole lot of bloggers and aggregators and bulletin board owners can breathe a lot easier.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:17 PM | Print | Comments (1)Remember the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA)? This is the 1998 law that would impose jail time and fines on web site owners who failed to ask for verification of the visitors’ ages if the government deemed the sites in question to be “harmful to children,” although the goal of the law is to block underage users from visiting p*rn sites.
COPA was never enforced following federal district and appeals court rulings that found it to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court allowed an injunction against the law’s enforcement to stand pending a trial in Pennsylvania.
Along the way, the Bush Administration’s Justice Department created a privacy panic when it subpoenaed Internet companies for users’ personal search records as it attempted to build its case that the law is needed. Google got a gold star for fighting off the DOJ’s more intrusive demands and now the trial has ended.
Closing arguments took place yesterday, with the law’s opponents saying that COPA is so broad that it will make illegal informative web sites that have nothing to do with p*rn. The ACLU, one of the plaintiffs in the case, along with an impressive list of newspaper and magazine companies, argued that a whole lot of speech would get suppressed along with content that is arguably harmful to children.
Administration attorneys argued that the law would only punish purveyors of commercial p*rn and leave scientific, cultural and art-based content untouched.
Judge Lowell Reed of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania is expected to hand down his decision in Spring 2007.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:25 AM | Print | Comments (0)In news that should come as no surprise to most people, the Internet is a major source of science information, second only to television. That’s the conclusion of a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which found that 20% of all Americans, or about 40 million people, turn to the Internet for most of their science news.
Television, of course, is tops, with 41% of Americans say TV provides most their science news. (In an interesting finding, broadband users are as equally likely to use the Internet as a source of science information as they are to use TV.) Newspapers and magazines fall a distant third with each cited by 14% of Americans as their main source of science news, although the questionnaire didn’t allow respondents to say whether or not they were looking at online versions of newspapers and magazines as they looked for science news.
Libraries, which used to be the main venue for finding out about science, seem to be antiquated locales of knowledge. The Pew study asked the survey respondents about three areas of scientific inquiry, one of which was “stem cell research.” Slightly more than two-thirds (67%) of Americans turn to the Internet to find out about this difficult subject, but only 11% go to libraries to learn more about stem cell research.
One encouraging finding is that 62% of Americans double-check the science information they obtain on the Internet — bad news, of course, for all those web-based businesses hawking phony scientific studies that proclaim the miracles of hoodia for weight loss, for example.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:02 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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