Individuals who use the Internet to distribute information from another source may not be held to account if the material is considered defamatory, the California Supreme Court ruled on Monday in a reversal of a lower court decision.The ruling supports federal law that clears individuals of liability if they transmit, but are not the source of, defamatory information. It expands protections the law gives to Internet service providers to include bloggers and activist Web sites.
Kinda a no brainer, if you can’t freely quote people you don’t have much news, if you don’t have news . . .
“Until Congress chooses to revise the settled law in this area, however, plaintiffs who contend they were defamed in an Internet posting may only seek recovery from the original source of the statement,” the decision stated.
The opinion, written by Associate Justice Carol Corrigan, addressed a lawsuit by two doctors who claimed defendant Ilena Rosenthal and others distributed e-mails and Internet postings that republished statements the doctors said impugned their character and competence.
Rosenthal operates a San Diego-based Web site known as the Humantics Foundation (http://www.humanticsfoundation.com), which is critical of silicone breast implants.
Rosenthal had countered that her statements were protected speech and immune under the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It holds 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.”
A California appeals court had ruled that Internet service providers and users could be held liable if they republish a statement if it is known to be defamatory.
California’s high court took that decision up for review because the lawsuit against Rosenthal involved an individual instead of a service provider, and opted for a broad view of immunity under the Communications Decency Act.
“Requiring providers, users, and courts to account for the nuances of common law defamation, and all the various ways they might play out in the Internet environment, is a Herculean assignment that we are reluctant to impose,” the court’s justices held in their opinion.
“By declaring that no ‘user’ may be treated as a ‘publisher’ of third party content, Congress has comprehensively immunized republication by individual Internet users,” they added.
Everyone who’s been embedding flash into a web page for a while remembers last year when Microsoft changed their browser in response to loosing a patent -infringement lawsuit. And then they changed it again soon after because the first change was so awful (Warnings everywhere!). What they ended up with - that white border that appears around a flash object when it is hovered over and must be clicked on before the movie can be clicked on - isn’t very graceful, but it what it is and there’s no way around it for a web designer.
It may seem like, or even be, a blatant and desperate attempt to get people to stop using the non-microsoft technologies like flash, java, etc. But yet we as web designer must come up with a Internet Explorer Active Content Fix. You could choose to follow the instruction from the new owners of Flash, here’s a link to Adobe’s Active Content Update Fix. But dues that’s like 6 long scripts that you need to choose for your particular
You could write your own solutions. In theory it’s pretty easy, for JavaScript writers, just document.write your normal code in. For php programers just echo it in. etc.
But here’s what I’ve been doing lately. Since I almost always use DreamWeaverMX 2004 on web sites, I found a nice Dreamweaver extension called the Softery IE Flash Problem Solver. It inserts a command that works simply. It only has two options, Fix the IE Active Content Update Problem on the current open document or on all pages with flash in the current local site. It works quickly and perfectly every time.
Don’t ya love it when something works just like it should?
What’s the most important thing to pursue when seeking better rank in the search engines? The number and quality of links that lead to your web site. This is the number one most important thing to Google and most other Search Engines (SE), when determining how “important” your web site is. Google even has a name for this “importance” called “PageRanktm.”
The most important directories are of course, the hardest to get into. The Yahoo directory, is a mostly paid-entry, human reviewed directory. The Open Directory is a free but very hard to get into, directory. I’ve learned of a new Blog Directory, and a few other and wanted to give you the skinny:
Remember, my fellow Search Engine optimization people that the text in a link should be the keyphrase you are targeting and that only. Otherwise the ranking value they pass becomes diluted.
It seems there was this video of some LAPD officers holding some guy down and punching him in the face repeatedly even though he was complying (during the video anyway), with orders from the officers. Seems the guy didn’t reported or if he went to jail wasn’t allowed to report it. But a few months later he see this video on youtube.com labeled simply: Police Brutality. Now it’s evidence in a civil suit against LAPD. Whoops!
