STL Social Media Guy

People, get it through your heads: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives online publishers lots of protection from liability involving reader comments and other user-generated content.

So I really love this item on the Citizen Media Law Project site. It tells the story of a woman who was threatened with a lawsuit because of readers’ comments that were critical of Mynutritionstore.com.

The lawyer’s strategy against the site 800notes.com, according to the law project, was to “sue the anonymous commenters, join the web host as a ‘necessary party,’ seek a preliminary injunction, and thus force the web host to spend money on lawyers, driving up its costs. He apparently hoped that the threat of such expenses would drive [800notes.com] to comply with his demands.”

I am not sure what [the lawyer] and his client thought was going to happen when they devised their strategy to scrub the Internet clean of comments critical of Mynutritionstore.com, but I highly doubt they expected a three-page response laying out the substantial financial risks they were likely to face if they acted on their legal threat.

That letter from the 800notes.com lawyer starts right out with a zinger: “Your claims have no basis whatsoever, and if you file suit…you will be exposing both your client and, perhaps, yourself to possible counterclaims for abuse of process as well as subjecting your client to an anti-SLAPP motion.”

Yeah!

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