Blogging is a new frontier in the Info Explosion Age but if a lawsuit goes the “wrong” way it could put a damper on free-wheeling blogs with their take-no-prisoners’ readers feedback: a case centering on the question of whether bloggers are liable for their readers’ comments on their sites.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
In a legal case being watched closely by bloggers, an Internet company has sued the owner of a Web log for comments posted to his site by readers.
Traffic-Power.com sued Aaron Wall, who maintains a blog on search engine optimization – tactics companies use to get themselves to appear higher in searches at Google, Yahoo and elsewhere – alleging defamation and publication of trade secrets. The suit, filed in a Nevada state court earlier this month, also listed as defendants several unnamed users of the blog.
At issue are statements posted in the comments section of Mr. Wall’s blog, SEOBook.com. Many blogs allow readers to post comments, often anonymously, and Mr. Wall’s blog included several reader submissions that blasted tools sold by Traffic-Power.com.
Traffic-Power.com said in the suit that confidential information about the company has been published on the blog, and it accused Mr. Wall of publishing “false and defamatory information,” but it didn’t identify any of the material in question.Legal analysts said the case falls into somewhat murky legal territory, but that Mr. Wall may have some protection from liability under federal law. Courts generally have held that the operators of computer message boards and mailing lists cannot be held liable for statements posted by other people. Blogs might be viewed in a similar light, they said.
Even so, no one likes to be sued…because it ain’t over until The Fat Judge rules:
Mr. Wall, 25 years old, who runs an Internet marketing business from his home, said the suit “is so vague in nature that it’s hard to know what I’m being sued for.” He has posted the text of the lawsuit on his blog and speculated about which reader comments may have prompted it. Some visitors to Mr. Wall’s blog had posted comments complaining about what they said were unprofessional business practices by Traffic-Power.com, while others said they didn’t think the tools sold by Traffic-Power.com were effective in boosting search-engine rankings. Mr. Wall, of State College, Pa., had also criticized Traffic-Power.com on the blog before the lawsuit was filed.
Other Web sites have criticized Las Vegas-based Traffic-Power.com’s business, saying the company has coerced prospective clients into signing up for its service through aggressive telemarketing. Dave Baardsen of Absecon, N.J., who owns TrafficPowerSucks.com, said he also was sued this month by Traffic-Power.com in Nevada. He said he couldn’t comment on the lawsuit because he had not yet hired a lawyer.
Steve Pellegrino, a spokesman for Traffic-Power.com, said the company had asked Messrs. Wall and Baardsen to remove some material from their Web sites before filing the suits, and sued them after they refused. “We have let this go on a year and a half,” Mr. Pellegrino said.
There are a few issues here. One is whether comments are supposed to be anything goes, or if they’re actually more akin to a newspaper’s Letters To The Editor — which are always moderated. Many bloggers (including TMV) exercise very little control on comments on purpose and ban few commentors. It’s the name of the game; readers who are nice enough to visit a site have a big, fat say in the discussion (and we DO mean “big, fat say..”)
On this site we’ve banned maybe four commentors in nearly two years. Two were spammers. One posted under either a fake name or totally fake identity. Another was simply interested in name calling and not discussion (it was an extreme case). But, generally, we feel comments are a forum for interested readers who have near total freedom to write on issues we raise. We know of bloggers who have terminated comments or nearly gone off the deep end from pointed and insulting comments posted on their sites.
That’s one issue — whether comments should be left alone as much as possible to allow an almost free-association of ideas.
But then the issue arises as to what happens if a commentor says something proven false about a corporation or person. We had one instance of someone who contacted us in the past two years who made a excellent case that a quote on our site was based on source material that was totally inaccurate. It was not a matter of intimidation. He made his case very well. We went back and immediately deleted that info since we are simply not in the business of publishing as fact info that we know is false. If we had known that info we wouldn’t never have run it.
People can then say: “Well then remove everything X has said.” That’s different if you’re talking about a politician. (And we just know there will be some folks who will make a big argument about exactly that, trying to score points for their political side. But we say that makes us want to zzzzzzzzzz so do what turns you on and what turns us on is to move onto other things…)
But the cases we cited above don’t answer the dilemmas posed by this case.
Any person or corporation can assert that original source material (a news story, etc) is false or that a comment on a blog says something false about them. It’ll become a slippery slope indeed if someone simply complaining about a comment means bloggers must remove it. The person protesting needs to be specific — and present facts.
One solution: if someone is upset about a comment that they feel has wrong or hurtful info, then have them post a comment. OR take it even one step further (and more interesting for readers): balance it by doing a separate post with the offending comment…and then person/corporation’s response to it. Then they’ve had a chance to answer it and readers can make up their own minds.
It’s the same technique that newspapers do with corrections but the blog format would allow a blogger to turn that piece of disputed information into an interesting post that could have its own intrinsic merit.
Still, the tug-of-war in this case is between people and corporations going after bloggers because they don’t like what people put in comments on blogs and comments on blogs remaining a bastion of unfettered free speech and expression.
It’s a case to watch…and if the blogger loses, and bloggers start to provide lawyers with nice incomes, blogs may never be the same.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.