Passed by Congress in 1996, the CDA is best known as the vehicle that tried to stop internet porn by preventing the posting of materials that might reach persons under the age of eighteen. However, one provision of that act was addressed to the defense of companies hosting blogs, forums, bulletin boards, and the like. This is Section 230, which immunizes everyone who is a "provider or user of an interactive computer service" from liability for posting content from some other source. The corporate entity behind Wikipedia, it should be noted, plays virtually no editorial role in the content of the site, only rarely stepping in to delete content after people have raised complaints about it.
However, potential defamers, don't take this as a license to go out and post defamatory content on Wikipedia! Bauer's case is still alive with respect to nineteen other defendants, and I would not be at all surprised of some of those were specific Wikipedia editors - the ones who posted the complained of content. The CDA does nothing to immunize individual creators of content against such suits, and it very well should not provide such immunity. The Internet provides the broadest means of communication to have ever existed, and Wikipedia is almost universally one of the top ten cites to come up when a search engine seeks out any person, place, or thing that is the subject of an article therein. Although Wikipedia has a policy of prohibiting editors from making legal threats, this policy does not effectively prevent any lawsuits (in fact it says "If you must take legal action, we cannot prevent you from doing so") - but sometimes legal action is the very thing called for to maintain the civility of our society.
As to the merits of Bauer's claims, this blog will not comment - but may very well report what the court has to say, when all is said and done.
All images used in this blog are from the Wikimedia Commons.
2 comments:
I wonder what her damages would be? did she lose her job? Can she prove it was because of the Wikipedia authors?
Interesting question. This case was brought in New Jersey, which still supports "defamation per se" - meaning that, if an allegation falls into certain traditional categories, such as the subject being incompetent in their profession, then damages need not be proven at all! The court will presume that the injury is compensible, and the jury will decide how much the plaintiff is entitled to for suffering the indignity of having falsehoods about her published. Of course, nothing prevents the plaintiff from also introducing evidence of specific losses incurred, and seeking compensation for those as well.
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