Deeplinks Blog posts about CyberSLAPP
Should a company be allowed to use its own contractual fine print to take away its customers’ free speech? What fundamental rights should not be waivable?
We’ve written in the past about companies putting clauses in their form contracts that ostensibly forbid customers from posting online reviews of those companies’ products and services. Members of the Maryland House of Delegates have introduced a bill (MD H.B. 131) seeking to end the practice in Maryland. The bill’s sponsors are Dels. Jeff Waldstreicher, David Moon, Benjamin Kramer, and C.T. Wilson.
UPDATE: Thirty-three organizations, including EFF, sent a letter on June 15 to the House Judiciary Committee leadership urging them to move the SPEAK FREE Act of 2015 as quickly as possible.
A bipartisan group of representatives, including Reps. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA), recently introduced the SPEAK FREE Act of 2015 (H.R. 2304), a bill that would help protect victims of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, also known as SLAPPs.
Our right to express opinions online—for instance, to criticize copyright trolls and their demands for money in hopes of scaring them away—are protected by the First Amendment. The Georgia Supreme Court correctly underscored these protections in a ruling late last week about the state’s anti-stalking law. The panel overturned a trial judge’s astonishing order directing a website owner to remove all statements about a poet and motivational speaker who had a sideline business of demanding thousands of dollars from anyone who posted her prose online—a practice that had sparked plenty of criticism on the web.
EFF submitted an amicus letter to the California Supreme Court urging the justices to review a case that has significant implications for the free speech rights of anonymous online speakers under California law.
This is the fourth part in a series of posts about the importance of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230). CDA 230 limits the liability of a number of Internet services that host user-generated content.
Wikipedia is a perfect example of a site that relies on the immunities afforded by CDA 230. The website—the seventh most popular site in the world—is a completely user-generated online encyclopedia that is freely available in hundreds of different languages.
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