Plaintiff Austin, the owner of a travel-related business, accused the owner of one of his business’s competitors of posting defamatory content on the competitor’s website. Austin filed a defamation lawsuit against the company that hosted the website, claiming that it was liable for refusing to take down the alleged defamatory statements.
The web hosting company successfully moved for summary judgment, citing to 47 U.S.C. §230, a portion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 which provides, in relevant part, that “[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Austin sought review of the trial court’s decision.
Austin argued that the plain language of §230 provides a shield only for liability that would result from being a publisher of defamatory material. Because the web hosting company was a distributor of defamatory content, Austin argued, §230 should not apply, and thus the lower court erred in granting summary judgment on that basis.
The appellate court rejected Austin’s argument, relying heavily on the decision of Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 129 F.3d 327 (4th Cir., 1997). As in Zeran, the court found that Congress had spoken directly to the issue by “employing the legally significant term ‘publisher,’ which has traditionally encompassed distributors and original publishers alike.” The court held that because distributor liability is a subset of publisher liability, it is therefore specifically foreclosed by § 230.
Austin v. CrystalTech Web Hosting, 125 P.3d 389, 2005 WL 3489249 (Ariz. App. Div. 1, December 22, 2005).
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Communications Decency Act