Good news for US based bloggers and owners of forums, guestbooks or any other type of site that allows visitors to make comments; a Federal Court ruling in the case of Universal Communication Systems v. Lycos, a case where Universal Communications systems sued Lycos for defamatory statements made on a message board (I presume the mean forum) hosted by Lycos, found that site owners cannot be found liable for comments made by users of that site.
According to the ACSBlog, the court noted that “Congress intended that, within broad limits, message board operators would not be held responsible for the postings made by others on that board,” adding that allowing bloggers and message board operators to be sued for the statements of commenters on their sites would have an “obvious chilling effect” on speech.
(via Slashdot)
