permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Bloggers, email list moderators gain libel protection

Xeni Jardin at 7:53 am Mon, Jun 30, 2003

http://boingboing.net/2003/06/30/bloggers-email-list.html

An appeals court ruled last Tuesday that bloggers, website operators
and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for
information they republish. I covered the story for Wired News:

    Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory.
The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which
can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online
communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that
DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily.

    "One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and
they're not just selling information -- they're selling reliability,"
said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren't necessarily selling
anything, they're just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech
wouldn't exist if you were held liable for every piece of information
you cut, paste and forward."

    The court based its decision on a section of the 1996
Communications Decency Act, or the CDA. That section states, "... no
provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated
as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another
information content provider." Three cases since then -- Zeran v. AOL,
Gentry v. eBay and Schneider v. Amazon -- have granted immunity to
commercial online service providers.

Link to Wired News story, Discuss
http://wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59424,00.html