On Monday the California Supreme Court ruled that forum administrators, bloggers and members of Internet bulletin board groups cannot be held responsible for posting libel statements made by other individuals.

This decision is "a victory for Internet free speech advocates, who warned that a contrary outcome could have affected users of newsgroups, blogs, listservs, and bulletin boards who enter those forums to discuss the views of others. A loss could even have jeopardized websites run by students to evaluate their professors, said the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in friend of court briefs," reports MS NBC.

This lawsuit was filed against Ilena Rosenthal who created a newsgroup to discuss issues related to breast implants. A few years ago she posted a highly critical letter of a man who accused the doctor Terry Polevoy of trying "to discredit advocates of alternative health treatments."

The author of the letter claimed that Polevoy tried 'to get an alternative medicine radio program canceled by using "scare tactics, stalking, and intimidation techniques" against the program's producer,' the story continues.

Polevoy sued Ilena Rosenthal for libel.

Because Rosenthal did not write the letter herself but just posted it she was granted immunity from suit under a section of the federal Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress in 1966.

The California Supreme Court expressed their concern that such broad immunity for publishing defamatory statements "has some troubling consequence"

Yet, the court announced, "Until Congress chooses to revise the settled law in this area people who contend they were defamed on the Internet can seek recovery only from the original source of the statement, not from those who re-post it."

MS NEWS