holding the owner of an internet forum not liable for its users’ defamatory messages; the website owner complied with the hosting exemption’s requirements to be free from liability as it had no actual knowledge or awareness of facts or circumstances revealing the illegal nature of the offensive comment, and promptly removed it once notified about it.
holding the owner of a website not liable for defamatory comments posted by one user; the defendant qualified for the hosting safe harbor and thus was exempted from liability.
holding Yahoo! not liable for comments posted on a chat room hosted by Yahoo!; the defendant qualified for the hosting safe harbor as it duly removed the contents once notified and thus was exempted from liability.
holding the defendant liable for hosting a third party gripe site and awarding 36,000 Euros in damages to plaintiffs; the defendant could not benefit from the hosting exemption as it was deemed to know about the defamatory contents of the gripe site; the defendant argued that, according to the language of the hosting exemption as transposed into Spanish law (art. 16 LSSICE), actual knowledge only exists when there has been a prior decision declaring the illegal nature of the third party contents; the court held instead that Art. 16 LSSICE must be construed openly, as otherwise it would unreasonably limit the possibilities of obtaining actual knowledge of the illegal content hosted and thus would not be in accordance with the eCommerce Directive.
holding the owner of an internet forum not liable for defamatory comments posted by users; the defendant was qualified for the hosting safe harbor and thus was exempted from liability.
dismissing a criminal claim against the owner of a website that provides links to copyright infringing content; the court held that linking to content hosted somewhere else does not amount to a communication to the public of the content linked to, which is one of the elements necessary for the crime; in any event the accused party would be protected from criminal liability by the linking safe harbor.