Wikipedia Not Liable For Defamation In France

from the hurray-for-safe-harbors dept

We're big believers in the importance of various "safe harbors" that protect online service providers from being responsible for the activities or content of their users. After all, it seems unfair to blame the telephone company if a telephone is used in a crime. However, some people have trouble with that concept -- and some countries don't have the same sort of clear cut safe harbor provisions written into law that the US offers. For example, it seemed pretty ridiculous that France declared Yahoo (yes, the company) and its then CEO war criminals half a decade ago, just because some users had auctioned Nazi memorabilia. After realizing how ridiculous this was, French courts later reversed that ruling -- and now perhaps they recognize the importance of these kinds of safe harbors. Apparently, they even changed the law in 2004 to protect sites from being liable for certain actions of its users -- and that law has been now used to clear Wikipedia of any wrongdoing, after the company behind Wikipedia was sued by three people who were upset about how others had written about them in a Wikipedia article. The court noted that the allegedly defamatory references had been removed and that Wikipedia shouldn't be responsible for that content anyway: "Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature." Nice to see these kinds of safe harbors getting more widespread acceptance.

Filed Under: defamation, france, safe harbors, wikipedia

Australian Online Forum Sued Because Users Wrote How They Didn't Like Accounting Software Package

from the safe-harbors-anyone? dept

While there are lots of problematic laws when it comes to the internet, two things that the US got right (though, in otherwise troublesome laws) was putting in various "safe harbor" provisions that protect service providers from the actions of their users, whether it's for copyright infringement (in the DMCA) or libel (in the CDA). Folks in other countries aren't so lucky, leading to all sorts of questionable lawsuits that seem to be a lot more about silencing critics than dealing with actual libel or infringement. The latest such story comes from Australia. Reader technofear writes in to let us know that a popular Australian online forum (and the guy who owns it) is being sued by a software firm because a number of forum users posted negative reviews of their software -- which the firm considers defamatory. As the article explains, the software firm is going to have quite a difficult time proving the case, because the company would need to show the statements were false (pretty hard to do when they seem to be of the nature of "we threw it out recently... many hundreds of lost hours of work and high stress levels was not worth it") and that forum owner had malicious intent... and then also show that the company lost money due to these postings. However, in the meantime, the company can tie up the owner of the site in a costly legal battle. If there were clear safe harbors, it would be much easier to fight back and hope for a quick summary judgment throwing the case out. In the meantime, some folks are pointing out that, as should be expected these days, the accounting software that got all these awful reviews is getting plenty of attention, but all of it is associated with the fact that the product isn't very good and the company apparently doesn't handle criticism well. Perhaps next time the company will learn to engage and respond to critics rather than trying to shut them up by suing the site that hosted their complaints.

Filed Under: australia, libel, safe harbors, service providers