Free for a Fee

By Eric Goldman

Giordano v. Romeo, 2011 WL 6782933 (Fla. App. Ct. Dec. 28, 2011). . . . .

Some quick background. In the wake of the Seventh Circuit’s Blockowicz ruling, which said that Ripoff Report couldn’t be forced to remove a third party post under FRCP 65, a Florida state court judge went off the rails in a similar case. That judge held that 47 USC 230 did not prevent the judge from ordering Ripoff Report to remove the user post. This was a rogue ruling by a judge who clearly wasn’t interested in what the law actually said. In an interesting turn, that judge wasn’t reelected (the voters apparently got it right on that one!) and the case transferred to a new trial judge, who promptly reversed the ruling and upheld Ripoff Report’s 230 immunity.

On appeal, the intermediate appellate court upheld the second trial judge’s ruling in a short (and, as you can see, sharp) ruling. In 2001, the Florida Supreme Court, in Doe v. AOL, adopted a broad reading of 230 as Florida law, and this court sees that ruling as dispositive: “Consequently, under Florida law, section 230 of the CDA ‘creates a federal immunity to any cause of action that would make service providers liable for information originating with a third-party user of the service.'”

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/12/ripoff_report_m.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

June 30, 2011

A divided New York Court of Appeals ruled on June 14, 2011, that an online forum administrator’s additions to an allegedly defamatory post by a user are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Shiamili v. The Real Estate Group of New York, Inc., No. 105, (N.Y. June 14, 2011). This is the first ruling by New York’s highest court on the scope of CDA Section 230, it was noted in both the majority opinion and the dissent.

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The content in this post was found at http://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2011/06/30/new-york-high-court-splits-on-applicability-of-communications-decency-act-section-230-to-online-forum-operator/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20NewMediaAndTechnologyLaw%20%28New%20Media%20and%20Technology%20Law%29 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

By Eric Goldman

june 28, 1011

Earlier this month, Internet law superstar Ian Ballon and I spoke for about 90 minutes on hot topics in Internet law. Watch the video by downloading or streaming (item #47) it.

I spoke about recent legal developments related to user-generated content. My talk slides.

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/06/hot_topics_in_u.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

April 20, 2011

By Eric Goldman

Kruska v. Perverted Justice Foundation Inc., 2011 WL 1260224 (D. Ariz. April 5, 2011)

This is my third time blogging this case. The latest ruling involves a blog, run by Brocious, for people fighting pedophiles. Someone (presumably a third party user) allegedly posted a comment to the blog saying that Kruska had “starved a child.”

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/04/blogger_gets_47.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

By Eric Goldman

April 13, 2011

I’m pleased to announce the launch of DoctoredReviews.com, a website that addresses Medical Justice’s form contract that seeks to restrict patients’ online reviews of doctors by taking a prospective copyright assignment in the patients’ unwritten reviews.

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/04/announcing_doct.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

By Eric Goldman

You may recall that Medical Justice is a vendor trying to help doctors squelch online patient reviews–most recently by getting a prospective copyright assignment of the unwritten reviews and then sending 512(c)(3) takedown notices for any unwanted online reviews that are now newly owned. This is a terrible hack on the entire consumer review ecosystem, and it’s been bothering me for some time as I mentioned in my recent Regulation of Reputational Information paper.

Last month, I gave my first public talk about Medical Justice at the University of Houston. I styled the talk “Consumer Reviews of Doctors and Copyright Law,” two topics I never thought would go together but apparently they do. My talk slides. I will have more to say about Medical Justice’s system and its many deficiencies in the near future.

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2011/02/consumer_review_2.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

If there’s one thing I know not to do, it’s publicly bash my boss on Facebook (not that I ever would!). Some people aren’t quite so wise, though with the right lawyers, they can still come out of the experience in one piece. Such is the case for Dawnmarie Souza, who sued her former employer for firing her after nasty comments about her supervisor showed up on Facebook. The case has now been settled, and the company has agreed to revise its policies on workers communicating with one another.

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The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/company-employee-settle-over-facebook-comments-about-boss.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Rocker Courtney Love is due to head to court to face a defamation suit over tweets she sent in 2009. The case is one of the first to explore whether tweets can give rise to defamation liability.

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The content in this post was found at http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2011/01/05/tweet-music-courtney-love-sued-for-defamation-over-posts/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Flaw%2Ffeed+%28WSJ.com%3A+Law+Blog%29 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

A district court in Indiana recently entered a judgment for a plastic surgeon against a former patient who complained on the Internet that her facelift led to breathing problems.  Among other things, the former patient, since deceased, allegedly impersonated the doctor by posting under his name and creating websites with his name in the URL and/or title.

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The content in this post was found at http://postorperish.com/2010/09/09/eppley-v-iacovelli-plastic-surgery-defamation-trademark-commercial/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Hoping to administer a powerful sockdolager to online fraudsters, the California legislature passed a bill earlier this month that makes it illegal to impersonate someone else online.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/california-moves-to-outlaw-online-e-personation.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.