Washington Redskins owner, Dan Snyder, seems to have awfully thin skin for a guy who owns a sports team named after a racial insult. Snyder filed a frivolous defamation suit against the Washington City Paper ("WCP") based upon an article &quo…
Call For Papers: The High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law and the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School are pleased to announce a new annual works-in-progress series for Internet Law scholarship. Th…
Blockowicz v. Williams, No. 10-1167, (7th Cir. December 27, 2010) Plaintiffs got an injunction that ordered defendants to remove defamatory content from the web that defendants had posted. When the defendants did not comply with the injunction, plaintiffs asked the court to enforce the injunction against Ripoffreport.com, the website on which some of the defamatory [...]
CMLP received an email from a novelist asking us how far she can take
the advice, "write what you know." Would she risk being sued for libel
if she based a character in her fictional work on a person she knows and
dislikes in real life? Co…
For the London Free Press – October 4, 2010 Read this on Canoe The case deals with defamation on the Net and how to decide where to sue for it (NOTE: The title in the newspaper version was “Black lawsuit a case of libel tourism” – which is incorrect. ) Conrad Black has become a household [...]
Black v. Google Inc., 2010 WL 3746474 (N.D.Cal. September 20, 2010) Back in August, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed a lawsuit against Google brought by two pro se plaintiffs, holding that the action was barred under the immunity provisions of 47 USC 230. That section says that “[n]o provider [...]
Reit v. Yelp, Inc., — N.Y.S.2d —, 2010 WL 3490167 (September 2, 2010) Section 230 of Communications Decency Act shielded site as interactive computer service; assertions regarding manipulation of reviews was not consumer oriented and therefore not actionable. As I am sure you know, Yelp! is an interactive website designed to allow the general public [...]
I enjoyed talking with Anna Devlantes and Corey McPherrin this morning on our local Fox affiliate’s morning program about defamation online and the challenging problem of unmasking anonymous defendants. The video is embedded below, or you can go here if it’s not showing up in the RSS feed.
Johnson v. Arden, — F.3d —, 2010 WL 3023660 (8th Cir. August 4, 2010) The Johnsons sell exotic cats. They filed a defamation lawsuit after discovering that some other cat-fanciers said mean things about them on Complaintsboard.com. Among the defendants was the company that hosted Complaintsboard.com – InMotion Hosting. The district court dismissed the case [...]
A North Carolina trial court recently ordered the editor of the local community blog Home in Henderson to turn over the names and addresses of six pseudonymous commenters who allegedly defamed former Vance County commissioner Thomas S. Hester, Jr….