Comments on: Chilling Effects and Warming Effects http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2009/10/08/chilling-effects-and-warming-effects.html Musings of a techie lawyer Sun, 20 May 2012 19:43:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7-bleeding By: Anonymous http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2009/10/08/chilling-effects-and-warming-effects.html#comment-4620 Anonymous Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:26:00 +0000 http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/?p=624#comment-4620 I appreciate the importance of your work, but sometimes the injustice cuts both ways. I wonder what resources there are for individual victims of online harassment and defamation. Entities such as Google cite the safe harbor provision of the CDA to justify their policies against taking down material of any type, even when the material is clearly defamatory. An example of personal interest to me is false and malicious usenet postings that appear as front-page links in Google web search results. In this case, though written by a third party, the defamatory messages are stored on Google's own servers, the original files having long ago been purged from the usenet. Because the messages were posted anonymously, the authors cannot be contacted or held accountable. Yet Google still claims they are powerless to assist -- clear nonsense. Surely it was not the intent of the CDA to license publishers to archive, index, promote, and display defamatory messages. I understand the safe harbor provision was, in fact, supposed to encourage the removal of objectionable material by shielding publishers from liability for doing so, not to encourage inaction altogether. To interpret the provision as a license to shirk responsibility for libel is a perversion of the law and a breach of ethics and common sense. The problem of Chilling Effects is a serious one, but I would like to see some attention paid to the opposite problem -- when the corporate interest in free speech tramples individual rights to recourse against defamation. I appreciate the importance of your work, but sometimes the injustice cuts both ways. I wonder what resources there are for individual victims of online harassment and defamation. Entities such as Google cite the safe harbor provision of the CDA to justify their policies against taking down material of any type, even when the material is clearly defamatory. An example of personal interest to me is false and malicious usenet postings that appear as front-page links in Google web search results. In this case, though written by a third party, the defamatory messages are stored on Google’s own servers, the original files having long ago been purged from the usenet. Because the messages were posted anonymously, the authors cannot be contacted or held accountable. Yet Google still claims they are powerless to assist — clear nonsense.

Surely it was not the intent of the CDA to license publishers to archive, index, promote, and display defamatory messages. I understand the safe harbor provision was, in fact, supposed to encourage the removal of objectionable material by shielding publishers from liability for doing so, not to encourage inaction altogether. To interpret the provision as a license to shirk responsibility for libel is a perversion of the law and a breach of ethics and common sense.

The problem of Chilling Effects is a serious one, but I would like to see some attention paid to the opposite problem — when the corporate interest in free speech tramples individual rights to recourse against defamation.

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