Craigslist In Legal Trouble? Google, Yahoo!, Others Ride to the Rescue
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Written By Reprise Media | June 28, 2006 | Share This
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Craigslist will face a US District Judge in August over a federal housing discrimination suit, but in the meantime they’ve picked up a posse of online friends. Greg Sterling points to a story by the National Law Journal that says Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, AOL, eBay and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (to name several) have all signed a “friend of the court” brief backing Craigslist.
The lawsuit, filed back in February, goes something like this: Craigslist users routinely post roommate- or tenant- wanted listings that would be no-nos if they ran in your local newspaper, since they state (or imply) preferences for or against people of, say, a certain race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. A consortium of lawfirms called the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law cries foul, saying that the online classifieds site should be held liable for the discriminatory listings posted there by individuals.
If the wildly popular Craigslist (which is active in hundreds of cities) was forced to vet each individual posting, they might have to increase their current staff of about 20 just slightly. And as CEO Jim Buckmaster (yeah, we love writing that name) points out, the Googles, Yahoo!s and eBays of the world “have as much (or more) at stake in this matter than we do.”
Craigslist is basing its defense on the 1996 Communications Decency Act, claiming that the law is designed “to give Internet service providers immunity from such liability for postings by users, and that courts have upheld that protection.” We’ll probably see what a number of courts have to say about that; observers predict that it’ll take a ruling by the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals to settle the matter.
More commentary, on a similar case against roommates.com, is here.
Topics: Legal Issues |