LuminousVoid

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has written a legal guide for bloggers. It includes sections overviewing the legal liabilities faced by bloggers, IP and defamation law. There’s also a bit on media treatment for bloggers. They promise and upcoming labor law section — I think they mean employment law — to talk about blogging and work. Lastly, they also have a section on CDA Section 230 Immunity. My previous post was about the hypothetical of applying the CDA to someone who might provide erroneous info from the official florida sexual predators website on his own site. The EFF’s analysis is a little more sure than mine:

Your readers’ comments, entries written by guest bloggers, tips sent by email, and information provided to you through an RSS feed would all likely be considered information provided by another content provider. This would mean that you would not be held liable for defamatory statements contained in it. However, if you selected the third-party information yourself, no court has ruled whether this information would be considered “provided” to you.

Scooping up from the Florida site and rehosting that info thus is using the information provided by another, because you have not “selected it yourself.” So my long shot argument to try to get the provider out from under the CDA would not work. Now that I think about it, that push/pull distinction is flawed. Firstly, anything that is “made available” is also “provided by.” And the act is meant to cover automatic processes of information transfer, so the decision to gather one RSS feed is just as immune as the decision to allow comments, or to mirror other sites.

The EFF does not mention the Zeran issue, that is, whether once you are notified that you are hosting defamatory information, you have to take it down. I guess you should call the EFF.