Online service provider law

Online service provider law is a summary and case law tracking page for laws, legal decisions and issues relating to online service providers, like the Wikipedia and internet service providers, from the viewpoint of an OSP considering its liability and customer service issues. See Cyber law for broader coverage of the law of cyberspace.


The general liability risk within the United States is low but it's necessary to review the laws and decisions of all other countries because the extraterritorial application of laws to content hosted in the US is a significant concern.


1991 Cubby v. CompuServe  held that CompuServe wasn't the publisher and granted summary judgment in its favor.
May 1995 Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.  decision which held that Prodigy was the publisher, because it could delete messages.
1996 Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which states in part that "No 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". Note that this portion of the CDA was not struck down and remains law.
November 1997 Zeran v. AOL  The CDA protects AOL even though it repeatedly ignored a defamation complaint.
April 1998 Blumenthal v. AOL (part of the case against Drudge and AOL) held that the CDA protects AOL for Drudge's writing that Blumenthal, an assistant to the US President, had a spousal abuse background (retracted in two days) even though it paid Drudge US$3,000 a month for his columns, had editorial control and might well have been liable if it was not an online publication .
Lunney v. Prodigy Services Co. 94 N.Y.2d 242 (1999) held that internet chatroom provider was not considered a publisher of defamatory material posted from an impostor account due to Prodigy's passive role.
2003 Carafano v. Metrosplash.com (the Star Trek actress case) . Providing multiple choice options in forms doesn't invalidate CDA immunity.
Immunity under Section 230 requires that: (1) the defendant is a provider or user of an interactive computer service; (2) the cause of action treat the defendant as a publisher or speaker of information; and (3) the information at issue be provided by another information content provider. Zeran, 129 F.3d at 330. Even completely ignoring a complaint has generally been found not to garner liability, so protection appears to be very comprehensive, though it still doesn't stop people from trying.

In 2002, the California Court of Appeal held that CDA Section 230 does not apply to distributor liability, meaning that a defendant who had notice of a defamatory statement must stop publishing it or face liability. Barrett v. Rosenthal, 114 Cal. App.4th 1379 (2002). The California Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision overturned, holding that Rosenthal was a "user of interactive computer services" and therefore immune from liability under Section 230. See also Grace v. eBay, Inc., 2004 WL 1632047 (Cal. Ct. App. Jul. 22, 2004) (no immunity against liability for a distributor of information who knew or had reason to know that the information was defamatory). Grace v. eBay was resolved without an opinion. The lower courts in Grace and Barrett had reached opposite conclusions when they were appealed to the California Supreme Court. In taking these cases, it was deciding to uphold or reverse Blumenthal v. AOL. Blumenthal, noted the conference report comment that the clear intent of the CDA was to overrule the state decision in Stratton-Oakmont v. Prodigy and opined that accepting distributor liability would expose them to liability that Congress had clearly intended to protect them from.