Explore

English Version (1) The Court held that, an intermediary, even if it knew or had reason to know of the defamatory material for 52 days, should not be held responsible unless a comprehensive analysis of the following factors point to such responsibility: (i) the posting’s purpose, content, duration and method, (ii) the damages it has caused, (iii) the relationship between the speaker and the injury-claimant, (iv) the claimant’s attitude including whether rebuttal or takedown was requested, (v) the size and nature of the site posted, (vi) the degree of for-profit nature of the site, (vii) when the operator knew or could have known the posting’s content, and (viii) the technological and pecuniary difficulty in taking down, etc. Having said so, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court that imposed the liability for pre...

(English Version) (1) This is a much criticized Supreme Court decision on intermediary liability for defamatory content. There were two contradictory Supreme Court decisions (2001Da36801 and 2002Da72194, see below) prior to this en banc decision on the same issue. (2) The Supreme Court held web portal sites Naver, Daum, SK Communications, and Yahoo Korea liable for the defamation of the plaintiff whom the user postings there accused of deserting a girlfriend upon the second pregnancy after he talked her into aborting the first where the girlfriend then committed a suicide. The court upheld judgments of 10 million won, 7 million won, 8 million won, and 5 million won, respectively, against these services. (3) Specifically, the court held that, barring special circumstances, (a) the intermediary shall be liable for...

Holding the owner of a website – a political party’s local association – liable for third party defamatory comments posted to a website’s forum; the defendant carried out a moderation of the forum, but failed to prevent the obviously defamatory messages from being posted, while other comments favorable to the complainant were rejected; the appellate court was right in finding that the defendant had actual knowledge of the illegal content; the court cites the ECtHR case Delfi v Estonia.

Holding the owner of a website liable for third party defamatory comments posted to website’s fora; the defendant had some control mechanisms in place what failed to prevent the postings; the appellate court was right in finding that the defendant had actual knowledge of the illegal content, and that it failed to diligently remove the content; hence the defendant cannot rely on the hosting exemption from liability

holding Google and its CEO are not liable for the search engine’s links to pieces of news containing false accusations against an individual; defendants are shielded from liability by Art. 17 of the Spanish Information Society Services Act, which sets forth a safe harbor for information location tools; notices sent by the aggrieved person were not enough to trigger actual knowledge because the illegal character of the information was not obvious by itself and thus Google did not need to take the links down to benefit from the linking safe harbor.

holding a company running a digital newspaper liable for defamatory comments posted on its website by its users; the defendant should have taken more precautions and exert more control on the users’ comments; the defendant chose not to receive a notification which was not clearly addressed to site; in doing so it prevented the aggrieved person to inform the site about the defamation; the obvious defamatory nature of the comments is enough to trigger actual knowledge.