Recently in Section 230 Category

Two important things happened around MySpace in the past few days.  First, a California appellate court ruled in favor of the company in a consolidated negligence action based on allegations that the company didn't do enough to protect underage users.

Second, a federal district court judge in Los Angeles threw out Lori Drew's conviction for accessing computers without authorization.  That case arose out of the notorious events surrounding Megan Meier's tragic suicide.  Prosecutors allege that Drew, the mother of one of Megan's peers, used the social networking site to create a fictional teen boy to humiliate Megan. 

The appellate ruling relied on Section 230 to find that the plaintiff's claims were based on communications between users.  As such, they were prohibited by Section 230's immunity for interactive service providers.

The federal district court judge in the Drew case held that if Drew "is to be found guilty of illegally accessing computers, anyone who has ever violated the social networking site's terms of service would be guilty of a misdemeanor. That would be unconstitutional, he said."  The judge made his ruling tentative until he issues the written order.  The prosecutors announced their plans to appeal the decision to the 9th Circuit.

All in all, quite a week for MySpace jurisprudence.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act contains two important components.  The first, 47 USC 230(c)(1), is the famous section that immunizes interactive computer services from liability for content that third parties submit. 

The other provision, 47 USC 230(c)(2), offers the services safe harbor for any decision to remove content they make.  Thus, a website can't get into trouble if it decides to remove an offensive comment or explicit materials.

A case that could have major implications for websites that accept user-generated content in other countries was supposed to get underway in Italy yesterday, but the unplanned absence of an interpreter meant that the trial was delayed until late September.

The case involves Google's YouTube service, which Italian prosecutors allege violated Italian defamation and privacy laws by not removing a video from its library quickly enough.  The prosecutors have filed charges against four Google executives and are trying them in absentia in Milan. 

Eric Goldman, author of the Technology & Marketing Law Blog, has written a nice post detailing the Ninth Circuit's changes to the opinion it released last month in Barnes v. Yahoo.

As many of you may recall, the Ninth Circuit declared that Yahoo! was not responsible for the publication of fake profiles on its site (thanks to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act), but also kept the suit alive to determine whether Yahoo! was liable to the plaintiff under a theory of promissory estoppel after a Yahoo representative allegedly promised to remove the profiles but never did.