The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari this morning in Doe v. MySpace Inc., No. 08-340, a case raising the issue whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes MySpace from a claim that it negligently failed to protect an underage user from sexual assault by another MySpace user. The Fifth Circuit held that allegations in the plaintiff's complaint that MySpace had negligently failed to implement reasonable safety measures to protect her daughter--a 14-year-old who misrepresented her age when registering on the site--were, in effect, seeking to hold MySpace liable for the communications between the daughter and her attacker. This is forbidden by CDA Section 230, a federal law that immunizes interactive service providers from state-law claims arising seeking to hold them liable as publishers or third party content, the court said.
The plaintiff did not have a lot to work with here, inasmuch as the Fifth Circuit's take on CDA Section 230 was consistent with the language of the statute and with the overwhelming majority of prior judicial interpretations. In addition to the argument that the Fifth Circuit had read CDA SeCtion 230 too expansively, the plaintiff made a couple other policy arguments: first, that Internet businesses are not the fragile entities they were in 1996, and thus are no longer in need of special treatment; second, that the ruling below undermines the efforts of state attorneys general who are asking social networking sites to do more to prevent criminal activity. Whatever the merits of these arguments as policy matters, they are not the sort of arguments that capture the Supreme Court's attention.
With the court's action today, the Supreme Court does not have a case presenting a CDA Section 230 issue pending on its docket. Since the law was passed in 1996, the high court has declined all seven invitations to review the law: Doe v. MySpace Inc. (2008), Perfect 10 Inc v. CCBill LLC (2007), Batzel v. Smith (2004), Green v. America Online Inc. (2003), Doe v. America Online Inc. (2001), Ben Ezra, Weinstein & Co. v. America Online Inc. (2000), and Zeran v. America Online Inc. (1998).
Comments