defamation law

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a $1.2 million defamation judgment an airline pilot received after the airline reported that he could pose a security risk, Forbes reports. Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited the New York Times v. Sullivan in ruling that Air Wisconsin was entitled to immunity for statements its employees made to the Transportation Safety Administration as long they weren't materially false, Forbes further reports. The employees reported that the pilot, who failed multiple tests, was "mentally unstable." Forbes also reports "the decision reiterates the key test for whether a statement is defamatory. For a statement to be materially false, the court said, it must produce a different effect on the mind of the person who receives it than would the truth."

The first "Twibel" verdict in the United States (or the first defamation verdict involving a tweet) resulted in a defense verdict for Courtney Love. An On the Media segment said the case "could become the social media equivalent of New York Times v. Sullivan," and Gigaom notes "the Love decision is significant because it comes in contrast to legal developments in the U.K., which threaten to chill the use of Twitter in that country. In October, for instance, a U.K. man agreed to pay $25,000 for retweeting a false statement, saying 'From my own experience, I am able to warn others of the dangers of retweeting.'" But Gigaom also noted that the decision leaves unsettled whether tweets should get more protection than other forms of online expression and if it should be accepted that tweets are inherently opinion.

Love tweeted: "@noozjunkie I was fucking devestated [sic] when Rhonda J. Holmes esq. of san diego was bought off @FairNewsSpears perhaps you can get a quote." The legal standards were high in the case because Rhonda Holmes was a limited-purpose public figure. Holmes had to prove by clear and convincing evidence that Love knew the message was false or doubted the truth of her tweet.

The U.S. Supreme Court looks like it is prepared to throw out a pilot's $1.4 million award for defamation, Reuters reports. According to Reuters, the 2001 Aviation and Transportation Security Act immunizes airlines from defamation suits based on security-threat reports, so long as those "reports were not intentionally false or misleading." The Colorado Supreme Court said it did not need to decide whether the reports about the airline pilot (that he was mentally unstable and could be carrying a gun) were false before deciding whether the airline had immunity. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, "seemed to take issue with that conclusion" during oral argument today, Reuters concludes.

Reuters' Alison Frankel reports on a D.C. Circuit ruling that a spoof blog posting by Esquire about a birther book questioning President Barack Obama's American birthright was not defamatory.

“Where’s the Birth Certificate: The Case that Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to be President” was published three weeks after President Obama released the long-form version of his American birth certificate, according to Reuters. The satirical post said the book was pulled from the shelves and fake-quoted an anonymous source saying, '“We don’t want to look like fucking idiots, you know?”' Reuters also reported.

Judge Judith Rogers, writing the court’s opinion, said the test for whether speech was satire was "'not whether some actual readers were misled, but whether the hypothetical reasonable reader could be (after time for reflection),'" Frankel reported.

Foreign Affairs has this piece on several problems India is facing, including a lapdog press: "Restrictions have also been placed on civil rights; libel and defamation laws have become unsettlingly wide. Indeed, national newspapers and magazines, far from serving as a powerful fourth estate, are now commonly viewed as subservient to members of the government." Further, a governmental official floated the idea of governmental licensing of members of the media: "the minister of information and broadcasting recently put forward the idea that journalism, like law or medicine, should require an exam to assess competency. This would be an especially foreboding precedent: since Indira Gandhi evoked emergency laws in 1974, the media has generally been free to cast a critical eye on the government."

Thomas M. Cooley Law School has lost its claims of defamation, tortious interference with business relations, breach of contract and false light at the summary judgment stage against plaintiffs lawyers who posted on-line to solicit law-school clients and suggested in their proposed complaint that the law school used "'Enron-style'" accounting techniques, according to the opinion.

U.S. District Judge Robet J. Jonker of the Western District of Michigan said in his opinion that the law school is a limited purpose public figure involved in a public controversy about the value of a legal education for students. Even President Obama has weighed in on the future of legal education, the judge said in his opinion. A reasonable jury could not find by clear and convincing evidence that the defendants acted with actual malice, or reckless disregard for the truth of their statements, the judge said.

According to the opinion, the judge also found that many of the statements are protected exaggeration: "At least two statements fall within the protected category of exaggeration or hyperbole. These statements include the speculation that 'most likely schools like Thomas Cooley will continue to defraud unwitting
students unless held civilly accountable' and that Cooley 'blatantly misrepresents and manipulates its employment statistics ... employing the type of ‘Enron-style’ accounting techniques that would leave
most for-profit companies facing the long barrel of a government indictment and the prospect of paying a
substantial criminal fine,'" the judge said. "Further, the statement that 'Cooley grossly inflates its graduates’
reported mean salaries' may not merely be protected hyperbole, but actually substantially true."

Read the full opinion here: http://www.abajournal.com/files/Opinion_Granting_SJ_Motion.pdf

One blog notes "plaintiffs losing defamation law suits tend to look a lot worse coming out of the suit than they did going in": http://kevin.lexblog.com/2013/09/30/defamation-suits-versus-social-media...

John Dean has this analysis of the Jones V. Dirty World Entertainment case heading to the Sixth Circuit, a case which could change the parameters of the law on the safe harbors provided in the Communications Decency Act to Internet Service Providers from defamatory on-line material.

CDA Section 230 protects Internet intermediaries fr0m liability for information provided by other information content providers. According to the trial court opinion, a Cincinatti Bengals cheerleader complained about sexual postings about her, includiing that she had slept with multiple team members and that she had a sexually transmitted disease, on thedirty.com. But the site refused to take them down. Web site editor Hooman Karamian, also known as Nik Richie, not only selected what postings to put up but also commented on the postings. The trial judge, according to the opinion concluded, thedirty.com and its editor were not entitled to the CDA safe harbor because the editor '“specifically encourage development of what is offensive about the content”' of the web site.

You can read the opinion on appeal here: http://www.dmlp.org/sites/citmedialaw.org/files/2012-01-10-SummaryJudgme...