Free for a Fee

[It’s impossible to blog about Section 230 without reminding you that it remains highly imperiled.]

I’m so far behind in my blogging that you’ve already heard about–and forgotten–this ruling. Ayyadurai claimed to have invented “email” because he developed a software program in the late 1970s called “Email.” Mike Masnick, in his inimitable way, repeatedly debunked Ayyadurai’s claim. Ayyadurai retained lawyer Charles Harder, famous for representing the plaintiff that helped Hulk Hogan kick Gawker out of the marketplace, to sue Techdirt for defamation in Massachusetts. The court granted Techdirt’s motion to dismiss.

The court says Ayyadurai is a public figure and the case involves a matter of public concern, and he can’t prove the requisite falsity. With respect to Techdirt’s denigration of his status as email’s inventor (including harsher statements like “fake,” “fraud” and “charlatan”), the court says those “statements are protected because they are not provably false, are subjective statements that do not imply knowledge of objective facts, or are statements involving figurative language or hyperbole.” Like many other recent online defamation rulings, this court credits the hyperlinks to source documents (“by providing hyperlinks to the relevant information, the articles enable readers to review the underlying information for themselves and reach their own conclusions”) and the freewheeling nature of the blogosphere.

It’s a good ruling, but it’s a reminder that Massachusetts’s anti-SLAPP law isn’t robust enough to cover lawsuits like this. Massachusetts is currently considering a much-needed amendment to its anti-SLAPP law, but what we really need is a federal anti-SLAPP law that sets a minimum free speech floor across the nation.

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Case citation: Ayyadurai v. Floor64, Inc., 2017 WL 3896668 (D. Mass. Sept. 6, 2017). Techdirt’s post about the ruling.

The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2017/10/message-board-operator-isnt-liable-for-highlighting-user-comments-ayyadurai-v-techdirt.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.