Don't turn service providers into speech police

In today's San Jose Mercury News, Larry Magid has an interesting take on this issue: Painful as slander may be, don't turn service providers into speech police. Excerpt:

When Congress voted for the Communications Decency Act of 1996, most members thought it was just about pornography, says U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren. But one section of CDA had much broader implications, the San Jose Democrat told the Internet Education Foundation's second annual State of the Net Conference at Santa Clara University last week.

The CDA, which would have prevented the posting of material deemed "harmful to minors" was mostly struck down by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. But the court let stand Section 230, which immunizes Internet service providers from being held liable for what their members post by stating that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

The section was designed to protect service providers — at the time mostly dial-up services like AOL and Prodigy — from prosecution under CDA for distributing content posted by their members. It's analogous to holding phone companies harmless for obscene phone calls made by their customers or shielding the post office from liability for illicit material sent through the mail.

But Section 230 has also been used to protect social-networking companies and other Web sites with user-generated content whose business plans weren't even on the drawing board when the law was written back in the mid-'90s. ...

Thanks to Section 230, Craigslist won its case against the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights over housing ads that included such terms as "no minorities" and "no children." Even though such ads in some cases violate the Fair Housing Act, the judge ruled that Craigslist "is not the author of the ads and could not be treated as the 'speaker.'"

JuicyCampus.com also can rely on Section 230 to protect itself against lawsuits and prosecutions stemming from the potentially libelous statements that are all too common on this gossip site, according to Michael Fertik, CEO and co-founder of ReputationDefender. ...