more bad lawyering about Parler

Mon Jan 11 13:57:41 UTC 2021

In article <CAP-guGX0oWAbmvTM=icvAbLCH5GgjxEQw9-8HJ_KHFy0gVShzw at mail.gmail.com> you write:
>> Sigh. This is false. 100% false. It is the exact opposite of what 47
>> USC 230 really says. Also, it's the CDA, not the DMCA.
>
>Hi John,
>
>I conflated some of the DMCA safe harbor stuff with the CDA publisher
>stuff. My bad.
>
>I stand by the gist of what I said which, while imprecise, is
>consistent with what you posted. The common law precedent is that
>publishers are liable for what they publish. Section 230 carves out
>the rules for when an online service is not a publisher (which is
>decidedly not "always"), and while I don't have the cases on the tip
>of my tongue, there have been some real post-CDA head scratchers where
>a court decided that an online service exercised sufficient control of
>the content to have made itself a publisher.

I have the case law and with all due respect, you are still wrong.
The cases where the provider was liable are edge cases.  

In the 2008 Roommates case, an apartment matching service had a
questionaire that asked demographic questions that landlords can't
ask. and the court held that that asking users to provide the answers
made them liable for the answers. Except four years later they ruled
that roommates aren't landlords so never mind.

The recent Malwarebytes case said (wrongly I believe) that the good faith
filtering immunity doesn't apply when one antivirus program says another
is a "potentially unwanted program."

FOSTA/SESTA carved out an ill-defined hole for sex trafficing.

For any sort of normal content moderation, Section 230 does what it says.

R's,
John