Webmaster & domain owner sentenced for messages posted on forums

Faced with the sentencing of two French citizens in the framework of the Consumer Defense affair, we call for a boycot of all newsgroups on the 06/20/2002.

These two French citizens have been sentenced to pay 94,000 Euros, one of them as owner of a domain name, the other as webmaster, due to the presence of defamatory messages posted on their site's forum. It follows that all forums are now at risk: If, at any time, an anonymous internet user publishes personnal opinions, the webmaster and/or the owner of the URL will be liable for sentencing, and the forum will be closed.

On the 06/20/2002, we therefore urge all webmasters to direct their visitors to a petition page, and to close their site's forums, if needed. On this petition page, we call for financial contributions which will help support the two sentenced French. European internet users will thus be able to sign a petition increasing the lawmaker's awareness of these problems, and encouraging him to propose laws clearly protecting URL's owners and webmasters. Webmasters will find all necessary information to prepare for this protest on the Kit-Webmasters page

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The beginning of the end for unmonitored Internet forums?
Karine Solovieff, 01net., 31/05/2002 at 16:51
http://www.odebi.org/expl_eng.htm

For the first time, webmasters have been convicted for libellous remarks that were posted in their personal forums by Internet users.

At the beginning of the week, the courts convicted two webmasters who run private sites for libellous messages that were posted in their forums. The accused are not the persons who wrote the messages, nor are they the host.

The first case, which came to court on the 27th May, saw two students who own a personal, satirical website called "ligue de protection des Scouts d’Europe" (The European Scouts protection league) challenged by the European Scouts Association (l’Association des Scouts d’Europe) over messages in the website guestbook that insulted the Association and likened the scouts to Nazis.
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The second case was brought by the Pere-noel.fr website against the owners of the consumer defence website Defense-consommateur.org. The presiding judge at the high court in Lyons ruled that webmasters were responsible for monitoring remarks that appeared in their forums, and found them guilty of allowing libellous messages and insults to be published.

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