On the Katie Couric show on October 10, attorney
Parry Aftab mentioned (without explicit section name) Section 230 of the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, which included the Communications Decency Act,
of which censorship provisions were removed on First Amendment grounds by the
Supreme Court in the summer of 1997.
The show was primarily about chat rooms in which
adult men attract underage targets, who are often decoy police. Parry made the point that the 1996 law would
exempt service providers from any liability (including civil) for harm that
comes (to minors) by the use of their chatrooms. She might have been implying that this should
change. (See my COPA blog, posting Oct.
10).
Section 230 is usually discussed in terms of
protecting service providers (like Blogger, YouTube) from downstream liability
for libel or for invasion of privacy (which sometimes is closely related in
practice). But it provides protection
against most possible torts (like negligent publication, right of publicity),
but not copyright (covered by the DMCA Safe Harbor, a totally separate beast).
The Citizen Media Law Project has a primer on what
Section 230 covers. The link is here.
It’s interesting and important that the downstream
liability protections apply with reasonable extension. For example, the service
provider can edit the materials without changing meaning, solicit articles, pay
for articles, or supply forms or automated scripts to submit articles. It does not have to take down defamatory
content upon a complaint, but if it promises to do so and then does not, it
might incur liability.
This summer, there was a proposal (by Joe Lieberman)
to weaken Section 230 protections with the use of the words “Good Samaritan” (apparently requiring a "good samaritan" or "whistleblowing" intent before immunity applies). Proponents of this legislated change claim
that other media like newspapers don’t enjoy this protection (I thought they
did have immunity, when they get comments from users to a news story and act
essentially as a “service provider” or “utility” rather than “publisher” or “distributor”). See “Rexxfield” here.
No comments:
Post a Comment