Quote:
Originally Posted by Jason Dunn
But is it illegal to post an URL online, and to hold a forum owner responsible for the actions of his community? No, absolutely not.
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Jason,
AFAIK, the owner of the site is always responsible for the content he publishes. The owner of a site has a responsibility to check the legality of activities performed by community members on his site: he may not have written it or even support it, but he is the one who makes it public. And by doing that, he is partially responsible for the effects.
At least in the Netherlands there have been convictions of website-owners failing to moderate their website and therefore implicitly allowing illegal activities to be performed on their site (in their case death threats to other people). The judge declared in the ruling that one may assume a certain level of moderation on a site, being either pro-active (moderators monitoring the site on a regular basis) of reactive (an owner directly acting upon complaints). He also expressed that when a site is very pro-actively moderating/stimulating content in favour of its own interest (i.e. fighting SPAM or pushing users to more activity to get more visitors) one also might expect a similar level of moderation in protecting people/public from specific content. Needless to say these people were quite actively putting oil onto the fire each time they saw one to generate more advertising income.
So I think that the responsibility is there
if it was illegal. Question is if it is illegal and if it falls under the DMCA. That is lawyerstuff. I think that if MobiTV acted a little less agressive and a bit more sensible (protect the content with passwords, ask to remove the link nicely) they got what they wanted in much less hassle.
Jaap