The New York Times reported that Demon Internet, a British Internet Service Provider (ISP) would pay US$25,000 in damages to a physicist who claimed he was the victim of a "squalid, obcene and defamatory" message posted on one of the company's electronic bulletin boards in 1997. Another similar message was posted the following year.
Last Thursday, Demon said it would also pay the court costs for physicist Laurence Godfrey.
The decision is significant as it establishes that ISPs are liable for the content of messages that they carry, regardless of the messages' origin.
Although ISPs will not be required to screen messages before they are posted, they will have to respond quickly to take down offensive material, which could result in a form of censorship of cyberspace.
Surfers can take a little comfort in the fact that most of the Internet is in the US, where laws are more liberal. An ISP in America is no more liable for messages it carries than the postal service is for the content of the letters it delivers.
Late last month, for instance, a fake Lucent Technologies press release was posted on a message board of Yahoo!, the biggest Web-navigation company with 120 million users around the world.
Similar cases last year involved PairGain Technologies Inc, a maker of phone equipment, and online auctioneer Bid.Com International. Fake reports regarding both companies were posted on Yahoo!.
Yahoo! took down the messages when notified, but was not sued.
Given the fact that the Web is internationally accessible, a defamatory message posted on an American Website would be readable by British surfers. The ISP would only be vulnerable if it had physical assets in Britain.
Still, media lawyer Mark Stephens was quoted as saying that the decision could tie up the Web, as ISPs could always become tangled in expensive law suits in British courts by the rich and powerful.
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