Liability Issues Return Concerning Online Posts
from the wait-a-second... dept
News.com is running an interesting article about a libel lawsuit against a business professor who posted a student's essay to the web to start a discussion. The problem was that the essay detailed the story from one of his students talking about how a company, Ben-Tech, had allegedly pushed him to take confidential materials from Siemens, where he was employed at the time. While posting the paper to the internet was mainly for class discussion only, Google found it, and that helped Ben-Tech find it, and decide that it was libelous. A lower court said that the professor was not at fault, but an appeals court has overturned that decision, claiming that, especially as a lawyer, the professor should have read the paper more closely and recognized the risk. While the case, on its own, is interesting, it completely contradicts another ruling that got a lot of attention last year, saying that simply passing on or posting online information from a third party does not make the messenger guilty of libel. That case was in the 9th Circuit, and the Supreme Court turned down an appeal. However, with some more rulings that contradict each other, the Supreme Court may be more interested in stepping in. Meanwhile, it looks like Ben-Tech is also learning about the Streisand Effect, where trying to get this story taken offline is only getting it much more attention than it ever would have received if they had just left it alone.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
I think
[ link to this | view in thread ]
semi-private, semi-public spaces vanishing
I think the professor does have some responsibility to vet the facts in the paper, because it was submitted to him in a semi-private setting by a student (not by a professional journalist to his editor, for example). The student is his protege. This is different from simply forwarding an email to a mailing list of co-workers.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Appeals court did not say professor was libelous
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Libel?
- It must be untrue. The old saying is that the truth is a complete defense.
- It must be malicious. If there's an absence of malice, it's not libel.
- It must have damaged the other party.
- There must be financial losses.
I don't see how the professor (or the student, for that matter) could be found guilty because there doesn't seem like there was any malicious intent.Of course, I'm not a lawyer....
[ link to this | view in thread ]
posting completely misses point of "passthru"
the ISP's can't look into content for this reason, or they'd be held responsible for the same reason.
two totally different situations
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: posting completely misses point of
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: semi-private, semi-public spaces vanishing
[ link to this | view in thread ]