Free for a Fee

I previously blogged about this matter (see also Venkat’s update). A Massachusetts attorney, Goren, was unhappy about a user review of his law firm posted to Ripoff Report, which is well-known for not removing user posts. The plaintiffs sued the user for defamation in state court; the user no-showed. The plaintiffs got a default judgment and convinced the judge to assign the author’s copyright as part of the relief. The plaintiffs then turned around and sued Ripoff Report for copyright infringement for continuing to publish the review. Although this particular method of getting a review’s copyright via a default judgment was novel, copyright-based workarounds to Section 230 are well-known and usually problematic. This week, the court rejected the lawsuit.

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