| Godfrey v Demon Internet Service | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Court | High Court, Queen's Bench Division |
| Citation(s) | [1999] 4 All ER 342, [2001] QB 201 |
| Keywords | |
| Libel | |
Godfrey v Demon Internet Service [2001] QB 201 was a landmark court case in the United Kingdom concerning online defamation and the liability of Internet service providers.
Laurence Godfrey—a physics lecturer—learned that someone had posted a message to the Usenet discussion group soc.culture.thai. That message—sent by an unknown source—had been forged to appear to have been sent by Dr. Godfrey.
On 17 January 1997 Godfrey contacted Demon Internet, to inform them of the forged message and ask that it be deleted from Demon Internet's Usenet news server. Demon Internet declined to remove the message, which remained on its servers for ten additional days, at which time it was automatically deleted along with all other old messages.
Godfrey sued for libel, citing Demon's failure to remove the forged message at the time of his initial complaint.
Ruling on a pre-trial motion, the court found that an Internet service provider can be sued for libel, and that any transmission by a service provider of a defamatory posting constituted a publication under defamation law. Demon thereafter entered into an out-of-court settlement that paid Godfrey £15,000 plus £250,000 for his legal expenses. [1]
There have since appeared several misrepresentations of the second of the two interlocutory judgments of Mr. Justice Morland in the (first) Godfrey v. Demon action. Having struck out the core of Demon's defence in his first judgment, Morland J considered a further application by the defendant (Demon) to amend its defence to include a large number of extracts from other internet postings that the defendant sought to claim were Laurence Godfrey's words.[ citation needed ] It is emphasised that the defendant merely alleged that these words were Godfrey's. The judge also makes this clear in his judgment by listing all the material in question under the headings “postings allegedly made by the Plaintiff about Thailand” [2]
The judge described as "provocative" those words alleged by the defendant to have been posted by Godfrey. At that time Godfrey had had no opportunity to admit or deny these allegations, since they were made by way of proposed amendments to the defence. However, in the event these allegations were not proven and at the conclusion of the case an agreed statement was made in open court in which it was stated (inter alia): “Demon is also here today ... to apologise to Dr Godfrey for not removing the postings from its servers and for alleging in his defence that Dr Godfrey had deliberately provoked them, a contention which it now withdraws”.
Laurence Godfrey commented that he was happy with the settlement. [1] Godfrey was subsequently the plaintiff in a variety of other internet-based libel suits. [3]
Following Godfrey v Demon, ISPs began to remove defamatory statements as soon as they received a complaint about them. Media lawyers have described the case's resultant restriction on freedom of expression as "disproportionate" and suggested that it may not survive a challenge under the Human Rights Act. [4]
Defamation is a communication that injures a third party's reputation and causes a legally redressable injury. The precise legal definition of defamation varies from country to country. It is not necessarily restricted to making assertions that are falsifiable, and can extend to concepts that are more abstract than reputation – like dignity and honour. In the English-speaking world, the law of defamation traditionally distinguishes between libel and slander. It is treated as a civil wrong, as a criminal offence, or both.
Online service provider law is a summary and case law tracking page for laws, legal decisions and issues relating to online service providers (OSPs), like the Wikipedia and Internet service providers, from the viewpoint of an OSP considering its liability and customer service issues. See Cyber law for broader coverage of the law of cyberspace.
Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc., 776 F. Supp. 135, was a 1991 court decision in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York which held that Internet service providers were subject to traditional defamation law for their hosted content. The case resolved a claim of libel against CompuServe, an Internet service provider that hosted allegedly defamatory content in one of its forums. The case established a precedent for Internet service provider liability by applying defamation law, originally intended for hard copies of written works, to the Internet medium. The court held that although CompuServe did host defamatory content on its forums, CompuServe was merely a distributor, rather than a publisher, of the content. As a distributor, CompuServe could only be held liable for defamation if it knew, or had reason to know, of the defamatory nature of the content. As CompuServe had made no effort to review the large volume of content on its forums, it could not be held liable for the defamatory content.
Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 129 F.3d 327, cert. denied, 524 U.S. 937 (1998), is a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit determined the immunity of Internet service providers for wrongs committed by their users under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). Section 230(c)(1) of the CDA provides 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."
Varian Medical Systems, Inc. v. Delfino, 35 Cal.4th 180 (2005) is a California Supreme Court opinion by then-Associate Justice Janice R. Brown interpreting the state's SLAPP statute. Specifically, the case holds that an appeal from a denial of an anti-SLAPP motion stays all trial court proceedings: "The perfecting of an appeal from the denial of a special motion to strike automatically stays all further trial court proceedings on the merits upon the causes of action affected by the motion...you have a right not to be dragged through the courts because you exercised your constitutional rights."
Barrett v. Rosenthal, 40 Cal.4th 33 (2006), was a California Supreme Court case concerning online defamation. The case resolved a defamation claim brought by Stephen Barrett, Terry Polevoy, and attorney Christopher Grell against Ilena Rosenthal and several others. Barrett and others alleged that the defendants had republished libelous information about them on the internet. In a unanimous decision, the court held that Rosenthal was a "user of interactive computer services" and therefore immune from liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Free Dominion was a Canadian conservative internet forum. The site used the phrase "Principled Conservativism" to describe its ideology.
Fair comment is a legal term for a common law defense in defamation cases. It is referred to as honest comment in some countries.
A person who is found to have published a defamatory statement may evoke a defence of innocent dissemination, which absolves them of liability provided that they had no knowledge of the defamatory nature of the statement, and that their failure to detect the defamatory content was not due to negligence. The defence, sometimes also known as "mechanical distributor", is of concern to Internet Service Providers because of their potential liability for defamatory material posted by their subscribers.
Modern libel and slander laws in many countries are originally descended from English defamation law. The history of defamation law in England is somewhat obscure; civil actions for damages seem to have been relatively frequent as far back as the Statute of Gloucester in the reign of Edward I (1272–1307). The law of libel emerged during the reign of James I (1603–1625) under Attorney General Edward Coke who started a series of libel prosecutions. Scholars frequently attribute strict English defamation law to James I's outlawing of duelling. From that time, both the criminal and civil remedies have been found in full operation.
The origins of the United States' defamation laws pre-date the American Revolution; one influential case in 1734 involved John Peter Zenger and established precedent that "The Truth" is an absolute defense against charges of libel. Though the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect freedom of the press, for most of the history of the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court failed to use it to rule on libel cases. This left libel laws, based upon the traditional "Common Law" of defamation inherited from the English legal system, mixed across the states. The 1964 case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, however, radically changed the nature of libel law in the United States by establishing that public officials could win a suit for libel only when they could prove the media outlet in question knew either that the information was wholly and patently false or that it was published "with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not". Later Supreme Court cases barred strict liability for libel and forbade libel claims for statements that are so ridiculous as to be obviously facetious. Recent cases have added precedent on defamation law and the Internet.
Canadian defamation law refers to defamation law as it stands in both common law and civil law jurisdictions in Canada. As with most Commonwealth jurisdictions, Canada follows English law on defamation issues.
Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc., 907 F. Supp. 1361, is a U.S. district court case about whether the operator of a computer bulletin board service ("BBS") and Internet access provider that allows that BBS to reach the Internet should be liable for copyright infringement committed by a subscriber of the BBS. The plaintiff Religious Technology Center ("RTC") argued that defendant Netcom was directly, contributorily, and vicariously liable for copyright infringement. Netcom moved for summary judgment, disputing RTC's claims and raising a First Amendment argument and a fair use defense. The district court of the Northern District of California concluded that RTC's claims of direct and vicarious infringement failed, but genuine issues of fact precluded summary judgment on contributory liability and fair use.
The Libel Act 1843, commonly known as Lord Campbell's Libel Act, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It enacted several important codifications of and modifications to the common law tort of libel.
Doe v. Cahill, 884 A.2d 451, is a significant case in the realm of anonymous internet speech and the First Amendment. While similar issues had been tackled involving criticism of a publicly traded company, the case marks the first time the Delaware Supreme Court addressed the issue of anonymous internet speech and defamation "in the context of a case involving political criticism of a public figure."
The Wikimedia Foundation has been involved in several lawsuits. They have won some and lost several others.
School of Visual Arts v. Diane Kuprewicz, 771 N.Y.S.2d 804 (2003), is a New York Supreme Court case in which it was held that sending and/or directing "large volumes of unsolicited job applications and pornographic e-mails" by defendant to plaintiff if it depletes hard disk space, drains processing power, and negatively impacts other system resources of the plaintiff is sufficient to establish "a cause of action for trespass to chattels." The ruling has been followed and cited in a number of cases in different jurisdictions.
Astley v Verdun, 2011 ONSC 3651, is a leading defamation decision released by Ontario Superior Court of Justice. The case was publicized for the amount of damages awarded to the plaintiff, and the permanent injunction ordered against the defendant.
Obsidian Finance Group, LLC v. Cox is a 2011 case from the United States District Court for the District of Oregon concerning online defamation. Plaintiffs Obsidian Finance Group and its co-founder Kevin Padrick sued Crystal Cox for maintaining several blogs that accused Obsidian and Padrick of corrupt and fraudulent conduct. The court dismissed most of Cox's blog posts as opinion, but found one single post to be more factual in its assertions and therefore defamatory. For that post, the court awarded the plaintiffs $2.5 million in damages. This case is notable for the court's ruling that Cox, as an internet blogger, was not a journalist and was thus not protected by Oregon's media shield laws, although the court later clarified that its ruling did not categorically exclude blogs from being considered media and indicated that its decision was based in part upon Cox offering to remove negative posts for a $2,500 fee. In January 2014 the Ninth Circuit Court affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court's judgment awarding compensatory damages to the bankruptcy trustee. It also ordered a new trial on the blog post at issue.
The Defamation Act 2013 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which reformed English defamation law on issues of the right to freedom of expression and the protection of reputation. It also comprised a response to perceptions that the law as it stood was giving rise to libel tourism and other inappropriate claims.