Celtkin
☠️ Banned ☠️
We ARE NOT going to jeopardize our relationship with advertisers or risk suit...PERIOD.
Forbes
We are like Hardy in this case. We do moderate post and we do post content here ourselves. We are not exempt like a ISP who just provides bandwidth and has no editorial control over content.
As I mentioned earlier, even if we are sued and the case is later dismissed or we prevail, we will be broke and be out of business.
So, for those of you who insist that we can't be sued, you see that we can. For those of you who persist in wanting us to defy our advertisers and risk suit, well, we can all see that your interest does not lie with Finheaven preserving itself but rather in your brand of fun.
As I alluded to in another post, we are considering a Smack forum that will be compliant with the TOS and with our advertisers.
One addition to the law of libel is the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law passed by Congress, which ruled that ISPs could not be sued for libel based on messages posted through their services, assuming they did not take an active role in editing them. Volokh says even that law was unnecessary since ISPs, under traditional common law rules, should be no more liable for the messages they post than bookstores would be liable for selling a book that contains a defamatory falsehood without their knowledge.
What happens when a Webmaster does play an active role was the subject of another recent case in an Ohio state court. In that case, Lori Sabbato, a Jackson Township, Ohio, woman, found herself being accused of being a drug dealer--among other things--on a politically-oriented Internet bulletin board maintained by the University of Akron.
Again, the poster was anonymous, but the Webmaster was known: a professor at the university named James Hardy. Hardy edited the bulletin board, posted messages of his own, directing the discussion, and would even exclude posters whose opinions he did not care for, says Craig Conley, Sabbato's lawyer.
Sabbato sued Hardy and eventually found out that the person attacking her was Christopher Ruddy, a local police lieutenant who did not know Sabbato, but who may have picked on her because she was a woman who posted under her own name.
The more important result is that the appellate court ruled the case against the Webmaster should not be dismissed if there was an allegation that the Webmaster had participated in the libel. The appellate court reversed the trial court's dismissal, and sent the case back to hear evidence. Hardy, for his part, denied that he had had any involvement in the allegedly libelous posts, and no court found that he had.*
Forbes
We are like Hardy in this case. We do moderate post and we do post content here ourselves. We are not exempt like a ISP who just provides bandwidth and has no editorial control over content.
As I mentioned earlier, even if we are sued and the case is later dismissed or we prevail, we will be broke and be out of business.
So, for those of you who insist that we can't be sued, you see that we can. For those of you who persist in wanting us to defy our advertisers and risk suit, well, we can all see that your interest does not lie with Finheaven preserving itself but rather in your brand of fun.
As I alluded to in another post, we are considering a Smack forum that will be compliant with the TOS and with our advertisers.