The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has backtracked on its cont...
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has backtracked on its controversial interpretation of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields interactive computer services from liability for users’ actions. A three-judge panel recently held in Barnes v.…
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Yahoo that Yahoo could be liable for failing to remove a “revenge” profile page after promising to take such action (WID May 12 p3). The court said Yahoo couldn’t file to dismiss the case under section 230, which judges called an “affirmative defense” against a potentially valid claim that must be paired with “responsive pleading” -- in other words, full discovery. None of the parties had raised the issue at the lower court. Yahoo challenged that finding in a motion for rehearing, saying it would be time-consuming and expensive to fight claims that plainly can’t be raised under section 230. Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University, also had called the court’s discussion there “sloppy and completely gratuitous.” In an amended opinion filed Monday, the panel deleted that part of the original ruling without further comment. It also modified a footnote from the original in which the judges said Section 230 only protects against state-law claims by a plaintiff, an interpretation that Goldman had called an “obvious error.” “We limit our restatement of section 230(c)(1) to state law claims because we deal in this case [Barnes] with state law claims only,” the amended opinion says. It noted that the 9th Circuit has previously held section 230 applies to federal claims, as in the court’s ruling in a fair-housing discrimination case against Roommates.com (WID Oct 16/07 p7). “Because no federal law cause of action is present in this case, we need not decide how or whether our discussion of section 230(c)(1) would change in the face of such a federal claim,” the court said. It denied motions for full-court rehearing by Yahoo and Cecilia Barnes.