A former member of the Board of Education filed a civil lawsuit Monday against the president of the Board of Aldermen and the owner of a well-known political blog for allegedly allowing defamatory comments about her to be posted online.
Vulgar blog comments — published online two years ago — ridiculed Renee Luneau and accused her of committing at least three crimes.
Luneau is asking for damages in the amount of at least $15,000.
In addition to being a former Board of Education member, Luneau is a detective with the New Haven Police Department.
The lawsuit names Derby Board of Aldermen President Ken Hughes and Christopher Bigelow, of CTLocalPolitics.net, as defendants.
The lawsuit states the comments were posted on CTLocalPolitics.net, and that Hughes was the site’s “monitor and/or commentator.”
It does not accuse either Hughes or Bigelow of writing the comments.
Rather, the duo allowed the comments to remain on the site and “failed to make a reasonable and proper safeguards (sic) to prevent defamatory comments from being published on website known as ctlocalpolitics.net,” according to the lawsuit, filed by attorney William Wynne of Cheshire.
There is already bad blood between the Luneau family and Hughes, who is seeking re-election to the Derby Board of Aldermen and is the campaign manager for Republican incumbent Mayor Anthony Staffieri.
Luneau’s father, Ron, was an employee of the Derby Public Works Department. He was fired in December 2008 after a Board of Aldermen subcommittee investigated the alleged mismanagement of the city’s transfer station.
Hughes was the chairman of the subcommittee investigating the allegations against Ron Luneau and other transfer station workers.
Ron Luneau is fighting, through his union, to get his job back.
E-mail and phone messages seeking comment were sent to Hughes and Renee Luneau. Those messages were not returned as of 4:30 p.m. Wednesday.
A call seeking comment was left with Renee Luneau’s attorney.
Bigelow, better known online as “Genghis Conn,” is the president of Connecticut Local Politics, LLC, which owns CTLocalPolitics.net. He referred questions to his attorney, Jennifer E. Mira of West Hartford.
Mira said the lawsuit is a waste of time and money.
She said the comments were not actually posted on CTLocalPolitics.net. The comments were posted on an independent blog that was given permission to use Web space provided by CTLocalPolitics.net.
“In this particular situation the comments posted were not posted on the site owned by Chris Bigelow. They were on a Web site hosted by Chris Bigelow’s Web site. It was on a different Web site. In essence, they are suing the wrong people,” Mira said.
Generally, Web site administrators and Web site providers are not responsible for comments posted to their Web sites, unless the administrator edits the comment in some way.
Blogs and their authors are protected under the Communications Decency Act, Mira said.
“It will be our position that the Communications Decency Act, along with the laws that govern public officials, will protect Chris Bigelow and his Web site for anything Renee Luneau is claiming,” Mira said.
Mira is not representing Hughes in the case.
Hughes was not a moderator at CTLocalPolitics.net, but, according to Bigelow, he was in charge of “Connecticut’s Smallest City,” an independent Derby blog to which CTLocalPolitics often linked.
“Connecticut’s Smallest City” is no longer online — and it is unclear if that is the site where the alleged comments appeared.
If Hughes was, in fact, in charge of the blog, he can’t be held liable for allowing offensive posts to remain on the blog, assuming he did not author or edit the comments, according to Daniel J. Klau, a partner with Pepe & Hazard, a law firm in Hartford.
Klau specializes in First Amendment litigation and is an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut Law School.
“The basic rule is that moderators of Internet Web sites, blogs and what not, are not liable for content that they did not post,” Klau said.
The lawsuit, filed in Milford, has a return date of Oct. 29.
“The basic rule is that moderators of Internet Web sites, blogs and what not, are not liable for content that they did not post,” Klau said.
I think you’re going to see a change in this after the recent lawsuit against google for Blogspot posts which defamed a model–she sued Google who in turn had to identify the author of the blog. I wouldn’t be surprised if this individual wins his suit, if, in fact he can demonstrate he was injured by this financially & he can demonstrate that he did in fact give fair notice to the blog owners, who do have the power to remove libelous comments, even if they choose not to exercise it.
The issue of anonymous bloggers is actually considerably different, and if anything, illustrates why this suit is likely to fail.
Let’s start off with the underlying issue. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
This was initially set up to protect large companies like AOL or Google and it is worth noting the several of the most significant cases where against AOL which AOL won.
Yet Section 230 has also been applied to anyone, including blogs and news sites that allow comments. The owner of the blog or news site is not liable for comments that someone else makes, unless they go out and modify the comments themselves.
As such, it does not appear as if this case has any merit against Ken Hughes and Christopher Bigelow. The argument that Hughes and Bigelow “failed to make a reasonable and proper safeguards (sic) to prevent defamatory comments from being published on website known as ctlocalpolitics.net,” doesn’t stand up when compared with other suits such as Green v. AOL, 318 F.3d 465 (3rd Cir. 2003). Holding them responsible “to make a reasonable and proper safeguards (sic) to prevent defamatory comments from being published on website known as ctlocalpolitics.net” would, in the words of the Green v. AOL decision make them “liable for decisions relating to the monitoring, screening, and deletion of content from its network — actions quintessentially related to a publisher’s role.”
This leads us to the Google case you mention. In this case, Google has been asked to turn over any information that they have about who really was making those comments. This is so that the person bringing the suit could identify and sue the real publisher.
Renee Luneau could seek to obtain from CTLocalPolitics information about who posted the vulgar blog comments that ridiculed her and accused her of committing at least three crimes. This would be more like the Google case, and I think Hughes and Bigelow could be compelled to turn over any such information if they have it. With that information, Luneau could then seek to sue the person who posted the information.
I suspect that the vulgarity in the comment would not have bearing, but to the extent that there are false allegations that are not covered by the fact that Luneau is a public figure, there might then be grounds for a case.
It will be interesting to see how it proceeds, but at least in the present form, I don’t see it going much of anywhere.
Beyond that, I don’t expect to see Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act being changed any time in the near future. It has been around for a long time and there is a lot of case law around it.
All of this said, I am not a lawyer, I just blog a lot about media and legal issues.
Would you post the complaint online?