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i think i finally see why monkey is gone. xxx could be liable for his slander if he is a mod. He works for xxx. pay or not he does officially work here. i may be wrong, but...





I'm not a lawyer, but i did read on another site that mods of mailing lists can be held libel for the naughty actions of their posters....but that was Canadian law, I believe.




I am, but I'm not about to post my Illinois State Bar Association number so take this with a grain of salt and not as legal advise.

For the purposes of law, board owners are publishers (I'm not actually sure about mods - Internet law is largely based on laws that were already on the books, and there's not a simple equivalent of a moderator outside of this medium). However, I'm aware of at least one case where a board owner was acquitted based upon the fact that he didn't require a login and removed the posting promptly. I can't remember the case, but the significant point was that the board owner had no more resposibility than the owner of a bar whose patron writes some unflattering remark about his ex-girlfriend on bathroom wall.

That obviously wouldn't apply to xxxporntalk, where it's known that the board owner does have "agents" stalking about and where quick action could be reasonably expected. It would make a considerable difference however that prompt action was taken to remove the offending material and prevent the offender from "republishing" the damaging material.

The real meat of this isn't libel, which everyone knows is very difficult to win and twice as difficult than that to obtain damages from, but interference in a business relationship. The threshold isn't nearly as high and some sharks are already figuring out that this is much easier than proving libel.

If the posting remained "published," I would have advised Chico to pay me my exhorbitant rate for an hour of my secretary's work writing a really mean letter rather than serving papers. It would probably do the job without paying for a trial.
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