Protect Internet publishers. But at what cost?

Last week, the California Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling favoring web publishers. The ruling says that Internet publishers could not be held liable for defamatory or libelous comments written by others. Offended parties can only sue the original source of the material.

The ruling is seen as a victory for online publishers but some bristle at it. A comment posted on Cyberjournalist.net weighs in:

This is nothing but protection for libelers and slanderers.

If Bloggers and “Citizen Journalists” want to be taken seriously they need to start behaving seriously. You can’t claim to be a journalists one day, and then say you shouldn’t be held accountable (as journalist are) the next.

I’m sure this is a complicated issue but I tend to agree with the person who wrote the comment. If web publishers cannot be held accountable for ALL content of their websites, what are the safeguards from the potential abuse that this decision would very likely engender?

The ruling, on the other hand, would be immensely favorable to information aggregators like Google, which gather materials on the web through digital robots. Any defamatory material reposted on their site or used in their services or products are not screened by humans. Thus, they can always argue that they had no malice while they aggregated these materials. But the damage will have been done.

It’s a technological thing, to be sure, but when does giving leeway to technology end — particularly in an age when it is tremendously easy to defame anybody on the Internet — and personal or corporate responsibility or accountability begin?