Defamation suits: Spare the content hosts
By Chua Hian Hou
POPULAR technology website VR-Zone has a team of moderators - including a lawyer - who spend hours daily trawling for and removing defamatory remarks made by the hordes of users who frequent its online forum.
Defamation lawsuits, said the site’s spokesman Terence Lee, have always been a headache for content companies like his, even if they had nothing to do with the comments.
So, it was with a loud cheer that Mr Lee greeted a recommendation from the Advisory Council on the Impact of New Media on Society (Aims).
The council wants online intermediaries to be given some protection from defamation lawsuits.
Such protection, said Aims yesterday, will in one stroke solve two problems: It will stop lawsuits against content hosts who had not put up the allegedly defamatory material, and overzealous censorship by content companies worried about such prosecution.
Since the Internet ‘is potentially a medium of virtually limitless international defamation’, people are more likely to sue ‘borderline defendants with very little role in the dissemination of the defamation simply because the creators… may be difficult to locate or anonymous’, the report said.
Singapore’s defamation law allows people to go after the person who made the offending remarks, plus others in the ‘chain of publication’.
Currently, network service providers, including SingNet and StarHub which give users access to go online, are free from defamation lawsuits.
But Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must not have made the defamatory remarks and must agree to a ‘credible and authenticated’ request from the victim to remove the allegedly defamatory material. Such a request is called a take-down notice.
But it is not clear whether content hosts, from blogs to citizen journalism site Stomp, are similarly protected.
Since no case involving a content host had gone to trial, the law remains untested, said Aims.
This ‘ambiguous and uncertain’ position means content hosts ‘have little incentive to continue carrying, hosting or linking the allegedly defamatory material, and may in the face of a complaint err on the side of caution’ and simply remove the offending material, it added.
This ‘may lead to abuse by persons who wish to have truthful but unfavourable material removed’.
Aims’ recommendation: offer content hosts protection similar to that given to ISPs, for defamation.
It also suggested introducing a ‘put back’ notice, allowing users to force content hosts to reinstate the original material.
This, it said, would ‘prevent abuse of the take-down regime as a means of censoring speech’.
Nominated MP and lawyer Siew Kum Hong, who blogs, said it is ‘generally a good thing for all parties involved to have their rights and obligations clearly spelt out’. He is among several in the legal community involved in Aims report.
Source : Straits Times - 30 Aug 2008
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