In an article titled “It’s a Dirty World: Internet and Email users Must be Careful About What they Post and Send,” David Shimkin, a member of Cozen O’Connor’s Commercial Litigation Department, discusses how courts continue to immunize Internet and email users from defamation liability as long as they do not “materially contribute” to the alleged defamation that they host, post, or send. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects website owners from defamation claims when they do not, in effect, enhance defamatory posts authored by third parties. The court decisions in the article “are consistent with Congress’s goal in passing the Act, that service providers that merely host or provide content are immunized from defamation actions. Courts will likely continue to recognize the protections of the Act even as technology evolves.”
To read the article, click here.