LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
Defamed on Web? Just One Year to Sue
Posted by Kevin Chen on Thursday, July 04 @ 13:09:55 EDT Free Expression
Article from NY Times (registration required):

New York's highest court has drawn on a 1948 ruling on defamation in deciding that traditional print definitions of when items are "published" also apply to the Web.

In its decision, handed down on Tuesday, the Court of Appeals ruled 7 to 0 that the initial posting of a document constituted its publication date and not, as a party in a defamation case had tried to argue, every time someone gained access to the document on a Web site.

 
Related Links
· More about Free Expression
· News by Kevin Chen


Most read story about Free Expression:
The Future of Virtual Kiddie Pr0n and Other Notes on Ashcroft v. Free Speech

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Well... (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, July 15 @ 05:22:14 EDT
I can't read the article (stupid NYTimes), but from the excerpts I've seen online it looks like a dumb compromise. Date of publication? So any date I say I put it up?

And what if it's a restricted access document: say subscriber only for the first 12 months, and then publically available. What if it's not indexed on a search engine, or if you otherwise can't find it? SOL? Guess so.

So, your only defense is to be constantly scanning a 10%-indexed, constantly changing source of information in hopes that you can catch data that may or may not be publically available?

You should have the right to ask people hosting information to pull it no matter what the date.

-- Ender, Duke_of_URL


[ Reply to This ]


Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
Everything else copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php

Page Generation: 0.186 Seconds