Blogger Not Liable for Third Party Posts
A blogger who allows others to post messages on his site is not a “publisher” of defamatory statements, thanks to the Communications Decency Act, a Pennsylvania District Court found.
The court dismissed a libel action against Tucker Max, a Duke Law School graduate, who describes his goal in life to be “a celebrity that gets paid to get drunk, act like an asshole, and get drunk some more.” He uses his website to share his adventures with the world, the court said.
One of the adventures that he shared was his-and other posters’-experience at a New Year’s Eve party thrown by the plaintiff Anthony DiMeo III at Le Jardin, a restaurant in Philadelphia. DiMeo did not claim that Max wrote the postings on the website www.tuckermax.com, which DiMeo said libeled him. DiMeo’s complaint focused on six postings by anonymous posters on the website’s message boards that discussed the New Year’s Eve party described as the party from hell. Patrons paid $100 for the party, but more than twice as many persons appeared as were planned for and the food and alcohol ran out before midnight. Eventually, the police had to be called to disperse the attendees.
The posts were described by the court as those that commented on the event, those that ridiculed DiMeo and those that expressed outright animosity toward DiMeo. Max filed a motion to dismiss under the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. Sec. 230(c)(1) that states that “[n]o 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.” DiMeo argued that, because Max could select which posts to publish or edit, Max was the provider of the information and outside the scope of the Act.
The court found for Max. The court said the Act’s provision was passed by Congress to “promote the free exchange of information and ideas over the Internet” and to encourage service providers to self-regulate the dissemination of offensive material. The court found that Max’s message board fell under the definition of a service provider and that he did not make the postings himself. As a result, the Act barred any libel claim, even though the court noted that “tuckermax.com could be a poster child” for vulgarity.
Even if the Act did not bar the claim, the court found the posts were either “expressions of opinion” or could be interpreted as not being serious. “After viewing the tuckermax.com message boards which are read by people using screen names like ‘Jerkoff,’ ‘Drunken DJ,’ and ‘footinmouth,’ the intended audience could not mistake the site for the New York Times. In short, it palpably is not serious.”
Anthony DiMeo III v. Tucker Max, E.D. Pennsylvania, No. 06-1544, May 26, 2006.