This is a disturbing development, with potential ramifications for Daily Kos.
An Internet Advertising and Marketing firm calling itself TrafficPower.com (Contact Info
here if you'd like to communicate your displeasure), is suing a "search engine optimization blog" for libel and wrongful publication of trade secrets based on postings by anonymous commentators to the blog (that's us folks!). Any court decision in the case could have troublesome consequences. As reported:
Bloggers have been buzzing about the lawsuit, swapping links to Mr. Wall's latest dispatches on the case and worrying about their own liability. Legal analysts said the suit could be a test case for determining what protections bloggers have or don't have for allegedly defamatory material posted by others. At issue would be the court's application of the federal Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that, broadly, protects providers of computer services from being held liable for content posted by others.
In a key decision in 2003, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the operator of a Web site can post material from others without liability for the content. "I think there's a strong case to be made that [the Decency Act] applies to bloggers," said Marc S. Martin, a lawyer with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP in Washington, D.C., who specializes in technology law. It "was written very broadly, and the Ninth Circuit interpreted it broadly."
But Mr. Martin and other legal analysts said it was less clear how a court would view the accusation of misappropriation of trade secrets. The Decency Act doesn't provide protection when intellectual property is posted, and a court may rule that trade secrets fall under the definition of intellectual property. State law, rather than federal law, generally applies to trade secrets.
Hopefully, the case will be thrown out of Court (and, if actual trade secrets were published, only the commentator who posted them would be potentially liable). But this one bears watching, as an unfavorable decision could allow emotionally challenged Republicans to file "strike suits" against Daily Kos based on what any of us say. Such tactics would function as a yet another nefarious means of suppressing opposition to the Republican party's dominance.
Let's keep an eye. . .