Pangloss is interested to discover a book in train via Wiki about aspects of blogging from (for once) a UK perspective. the excellent Naked Law people are doing the legal stuff: but I'm sure some of my readers might want to join in..
In other news, an unlikely segment of the User Generated Content world have just mounted yet another rebellion (cf AACS and Digg; LiveJournal and Strikethrough) - lawyers. After FaceBook was banned at Allen and Overy, the IT department was bombarded with complaints until they were forced to climb down.
Pangloss is not very surprised , following recent anecdotal discoveries that every respectable IT and law professional she knows appears to have joined FaceBook in the last month and a half. It is now officially CyberStalking 2.0 central (TM: Ian Brown). FB now seems to be becoming the first really major Web 2.0 site to transition from kiddy site full of tagged pictures of drunken debauchery, to grown up networking site essential for your everyday lawyer, banker or journalist. (One might argue that Second Life also vies for this title - but despite the discovery that it fuill of private islands hosting the creme de la creme of global capitalism, Pangloss still thinks its current interface is too crummy for world domination.)
More on this from myself and others at the SCL conference this Friday!
Showing posts with label web 2.0. Show all posts
Showing posts with label web 2.0. Show all posts
Monday, June 18, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Rate My Blog, no, Hang On..
Interesting new German case reported by Tobias Escher of the Oxford II. Sadly Pangloss has no German at all (stoopid Brit) so has to rely on Tobias's word for the quoted comment.
Scurrilous remarks on the German version of the web 2.0 site, Rate My Professor (or MeinProf.de) (an innovation which luckily does not seem to have penetrated Southampton law School yet:-) lead to demands from one particularly annoyed professor that certain posts be removed. Although the website took down hastily, the professor in question then went to court demanding the operators pay 3,000 Euros (about £2,000) for any similar comments about him that might appear on the site in the future. The court demurred.
"The court has decided that a general “cease and desist” for unacceptable comments is against the law. As a professor one has to face public criticism that cannot be prohibited ex ante. ..."
and Tobias comments
"Several things have to be noted: In general this is a positive outcome for web sites that leverage the wisdom of the crowds as it offers some protection for the often not-for-profit operators of these sites. However, this does not justify defamatory comments on those sites and the court has emphasized the operators’ duty to remove those entries as soon as they are recognized. Last but not least, the subject under public scrutiny does matters as professors might well be made to face personal criticism in their role as public figures while teachers and nurses might have to be treated differently. "
Interesting but not radical: it is apparent that the E-Commerce Directive Art 14 should protect websites like Rate My Etc Etc from liability for defamatory words posted by a third party. The ECD does not, however, as is well known, prevent the seeking and gaining of injunctions or interdicts to stop such posting; it merely immunises host sites or ISPs against damages. But the ECD does provide in Art 15 that web hosts cannot be commanded by law to monitor pro-actively on a blanket basis, which seemsd to be what was being demanded here. That rule was explicitly not implemented in the UK, interestingly, but only because it was understood to already exist at common law.
In the US as Wendy Seltzer notes, the site could not even have put on notice by the professor, due to the blanket immunity granted by the CDA. Rate My P could have kept the posting up without fear of suit. Whether in this case, as Wendy suggests, free speech should trump the desire of a scholar not to have his reputation casually trashed without any comeback but the self same Internet "right of reply" .. well, Pangloss will go back to her marking :-)
On the other other hand this decision is rather good news for eBay in its continuing desire to have no duty to check pre-emptiovely on the legality of the goods it sells on its various European sites, even where there is a known history and pattern of , say, the sale of Gucci counterfeit goods .. and Pangloss has said before that she is uncertain whether THAT is fair.
Scurrilous remarks on the German version of the web 2.0 site, Rate My Professor (or MeinProf.de) (an innovation which luckily does not seem to have penetrated Southampton law School yet:-) lead to demands from one particularly annoyed professor that certain posts be removed. Although the website took down hastily, the professor in question then went to court demanding the operators pay 3,000 Euros (about £2,000) for any similar comments about him that might appear on the site in the future. The court demurred.
"The court has decided that a general “cease and desist” for unacceptable comments is against the law. As a professor one has to face public criticism that cannot be prohibited ex ante. ..."
and Tobias comments
"Several things have to be noted: In general this is a positive outcome for web sites that leverage the wisdom of the crowds as it offers some protection for the often not-for-profit operators of these sites. However, this does not justify defamatory comments on those sites and the court has emphasized the operators’ duty to remove those entries as soon as they are recognized. Last but not least, the subject under public scrutiny does matters as professors might well be made to face personal criticism in their role as public figures while teachers and nurses might have to be treated differently. "
Interesting but not radical: it is apparent that the E-Commerce Directive Art 14 should protect websites like Rate My Etc Etc from liability for defamatory words posted by a third party. The ECD does not, however, as is well known, prevent the seeking and gaining of injunctions or interdicts to stop such posting; it merely immunises host sites or ISPs against damages. But the ECD does provide in Art 15 that web hosts cannot be commanded by law to monitor pro-actively on a blanket basis, which seemsd to be what was being demanded here. That rule was explicitly not implemented in the UK, interestingly, but only because it was understood to already exist at common law.
In the US as Wendy Seltzer notes, the site could not even have put on notice by the professor, due to the blanket immunity granted by the CDA. Rate My P could have kept the posting up without fear of suit. Whether in this case, as Wendy suggests, free speech should trump the desire of a scholar not to have his reputation casually trashed without any comeback but the self same Internet "right of reply" .. well, Pangloss will go back to her marking :-)
On the other other hand this decision is rather good news for eBay in its continuing desire to have no duty to check pre-emptiovely on the legality of the goods it sells on its various European sites, even where there is a known history and pattern of , say, the sale of Gucci counterfeit goods .. and Pangloss has said before that she is uncertain whether THAT is fair.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Web 2.0 sites beware!
Interesting decision from the States yesterday on immunity of hosts ("service providers") under CDA s 230 (c).
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just determined that Roommates.com - a networking site for people looking for, housesharers, did not deserve immunity under Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act for information that users of the site provide on questionnaires during registration.
This is rather reminiscent of the debate in the UK before the E Commerce Directive about whether sites were "editors" under the Defamation Act 1996 s 1 if they undertook any kind of filtering or editing of content - and the even earlier debate in the US about whether ISPs like Prodigy were putting themselves at risk of liability by undertaking similar editorial work to create "family-safe" content. Basically, if you are a user-generated content site, do you dare to mess with the content at all, even if the result is a better or more searchable/manageable/less offensive product for your users? Section 230 (c) was designed to put an end to such worries, as was in Europe, the ECD. From that perspective this is a very regressive step.
On the other hand, it has become increasingly clear that s 230(c) was too widely drawn in giving absolute immunity to ISPs/hosts in respect of criminal liability and non-copyright-related torts (cf the later DMCA, whose scheme is akin to the EU ECD in allowing limited immunity subject to notice and take down and other requirements) - and a series of cases have attempted to rein in that immunity by, eg, re-introducing distributor liability.
This case is a logical progression, but it is unfortunate. (A better solution would be legislative reform of s 230 (c) - but that ain't going to happen.) As the Register point out, what will the implications be for all the sites which "facilitate" or "edit" or "structure" or "filter" or even perhaps "tag" user-generated content - the MySpaces , Facebooks, and even the Googles? MySpace and Facebook both "structure" (some) information via menus and questions. So do many dating sites. What if some of this content is defamatory or obscene? In particular the word "categorized" is worrying. What might this do to the liability of new tagging sites like Digg and Delicio.us so valuable to the Internet at large?
In most these cases - especially the Diggs and Delicio.us es - I think the argument can be developed that they do not "thin down" or restrict or impose structure on the information generated by a third party content provider - which seems the nuance of the case - but merely add value to it separate from the actual text of the third party content. (What will AACS be thinking reading this, I wonder?) Similarly Google can argue that they do not themselves filter content but merely respond to user (ie third party) instruction. Nonetheless Google is usually made available with default on Safe Search, ie filtering out obscene content - so the position is not all that clear.
I await the appeal:-)
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals just determined that Roommates.com - a networking site for people looking for, housesharers, did not deserve immunity under Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act for information that users of the site provide on questionnaires during registration.
The Register reports that "Section 230 of the CDA gives providers of an interactive computer service, such as a website, immunity from lawsuits relating to the publication of information on the site by a person other than the site's provider. Thus, information posted to a blog's comments or on an online forum won't put the site provider on the hook for damages if the publication of the content happens to break the law someplace.
Someone who, in whole or in part, creates or develops the published information, however, qualifies as a "content provider," and falls outside the bounds of the immunity. The Ninth Circuit panel determined that Roommates.com, by filtering the kind of information that visitors to the site would see, had developed the information provided, and could not claim immunity for the publication of the information...
The key quote from J Kozinski is "By categorizing, channeling and limiting the distribution of users’ profiles, Roommate provides an additional layer of information that it is “responsible” at least “in part” for creating or developing." [bold added]
In other words, Rommmates .com were, it seems, held to have "created" , in part though not in whole, the information that users themselves supplied via structured drop down menus; (eg "do you want to live with [options] straight men/gay men/straight women/gay women/anyone")but not information supplied by users themselves in freeform comments. That information was then held to have breached the anti-discrimination provisions of the Fair Housing Act.This is rather reminiscent of the debate in the UK before the E Commerce Directive about whether sites were "editors" under the Defamation Act 1996 s 1 if they undertook any kind of filtering or editing of content - and the even earlier debate in the US about whether ISPs like Prodigy were putting themselves at risk of liability by undertaking similar editorial work to create "family-safe" content. Basically, if you are a user-generated content site, do you dare to mess with the content at all, even if the result is a better or more searchable/manageable/less offensive product for your users? Section 230 (c) was designed to put an end to such worries, as was in Europe, the ECD. From that perspective this is a very regressive step.
On the other hand, it has become increasingly clear that s 230(c) was too widely drawn in giving absolute immunity to ISPs/hosts in respect of criminal liability and non-copyright-related torts (cf the later DMCA, whose scheme is akin to the EU ECD in allowing limited immunity subject to notice and take down and other requirements) - and a series of cases have attempted to rein in that immunity by, eg, re-introducing distributor liability.
This case is a logical progression, but it is unfortunate. (A better solution would be legislative reform of s 230 (c) - but that ain't going to happen.) As the Register point out, what will the implications be for all the sites which "facilitate" or "edit" or "structure" or "filter" or even perhaps "tag" user-generated content - the MySpaces , Facebooks, and even the Googles? MySpace and Facebook both "structure" (some) information via menus and questions. So do many dating sites. What if some of this content is defamatory or obscene? In particular the word "categorized" is worrying. What might this do to the liability of new tagging sites like Digg and Delicio.us so valuable to the Internet at large?
In most these cases - especially the Diggs and Delicio.us es - I think the argument can be developed that they do not "thin down" or restrict or impose structure on the information generated by a third party content provider - which seems the nuance of the case - but merely add value to it separate from the actual text of the third party content. (What will AACS be thinking reading this, I wonder?) Similarly Google can argue that they do not themselves filter content but merely respond to user (ie third party) instruction. Nonetheless Google is usually made available with default on Safe Search, ie filtering out obscene content - so the position is not all that clear.
I await the appeal:-)
ps other views: Eric Goldman ; Eugene Volokh - neither happy.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)