Jack tips people to a report of a court ruling by Judge Stewart Dalzell. The report begins: “Bloggers cannot be hit with libel suits on the basis of anonymous postings on their Web sites because federal law grants them immunity by explicitly stating that they cannot be treated as the ‘publisher’ of such comments, a federal judge has ruled.”
Dalzell based his ruling on some of the remaining parts of the Communications Decency Act. Back in 1996, Dalzell wrote the ruling which struck down the bulk of the CDA as an unconstitional restriction on free speech rights. He basically knows this law inside and out, having been responsible for the first major pro-speech court victory of the Internet age.
His involvement immediately struck me, and I instantly recognized the name, because prior to the legal actions agaisnt the CDA, when it was still under consideration in Congress, I co-organized what at that time had been the largest grassroots online petition effort ever, attempting to sway Congress to block the law.
Yes, that didn’t work, obviously. But it did then prompt the Center for Democracy and Technology to capitalize on its popularity and launch a petition effort of its own, and was responsible for focusing much of the early attention on the issue, since that first petition effort existed before any established organizations had mobilized and marhalled their forces.
So, cheers once again, a full decade later, to Judge Stewart Dalzell.
