ISO message-board lawsuit threat stories
My cow-orker Lee Tien, one of the country's great free speech and privacy lawyers, is working on a case for EFF in which the California Supreme Court is threatening to revise the immunity for libel liability borne by people who host message-boards. Today, if you or Yahoo host a message board where one of your users libels someone, you're off the hook: it's not your problem. The court is considering changing this, on the grounds that Yahoo has enough lawyers that if it got spurious takedown notices over material that wasn't libellous, it would be able to tell the difference between a valid and a stupid claim.The problem is that bloggers and other individual and small-time message-board hosters don't have plenty of lawyers on tap to tell them whether they'll be safe in ignoring a takedown notice. The fear is that if liability shifts to message-board hosts, then the little guy will have to become overly cautious, treating every libel claim as valid, censoring his message boards willy-nilly.
In order to change the court's mind, EFF is looking for stories about small-time message-board hosters who've been threatened with legal action because of allegedly libellous remarks on their boards (we had one such incident, back in the old days).
Have you been threatened? Email Lee and help keep the net free! Mailto Link
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Cory Doctorow
Upcoming appearances
* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference
Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)
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