GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat 176
crush writes, "An Irish website RateYourSolicitor.com, which aims to let clients find and rate solicitors (a British Isles flavor of lawyer), has received an Irish High Court injunction to remove defamatory material about one such rated solicitor. The site is hosted by a US provider, gmax.net, which has reportedly been served notice by lawyers acting for the defamed solicitor. According to the article, GoDaddy, as the domain name registrar, has locked access to the site (registration or bugmenot required). (Amusingly, the records are all for a 'John Smith' in the Russian Federation at 'lawyercatcher@lawyer.com'!) An interesting twist to all of this is that according to the Communications Decency Act, an ISP, as a publisher, cannot be held responsible or legally liable for what their clients do. So how can GoDaddy justify this censorship? Or are registrars the weak link in a system that seems like it ought to be robust against censorship?"
WHOIS (Score:3, Informative)
John Smith
krasnaya ploschad
Moskva 00000
Russian Federation
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: RATEYOURSOLICITOR.COM
Created on: 02-Jul-05
Expires on: 02-Jul-10
Last Updated on: 15-Jul-05
Administrative Contact:
Smith, John lawyercatcher@lawyer.com
krasnaya ploschad
Moskva 00000
Russian Federation
714987650
Technical Contact:
Smith, John lawyercatcher@lawyer.com
krasnaya ploschad
Moskva 00000
Russian Federation
714987650
Domain servers in listed order:
PARK13.SECURESERVER.NET
PARK14.SECURESERVER.NET
Registry Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Registry Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registry Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Registry Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Status: clientRenewProhibited
Re:Not a surprise (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Censorship by any other name... (Score:5, Informative)
Side note: "your" freedom of speech is one predicated on government involvement. Specifically, the lack therein. It does not, however, compel a newspaper to print your article or letter to the editor. It merely prevents the government (in theory) deciding for the newspaper that it won't. The newspaper is still free to deny your article for any reason, whether trivial (it spelled "its" wrong) or conspiratorial ("for the common good").
Similarly, ISPs are free to restrict who gets to use their service. (Of course, there are other repercussions here - if they take an overtly active role in this, for example, they lose common-carrier status, and thus become liable for everything, where "overtly" and "active" are loosely defined based on case law.) If GoDaddy doesn't want to provide service to pornographers or spammers, that's their business. If GoDaddy has a weak stomach for lawsuits, that, too, is their business. However, even if they do have a strong stomach for lawsuits, their TOS says that they reserve the right to make decisions to terminate service unilaterally based on their perception of the lawsuit. The "with or without merit" part is simply a cover-your-ass statement that says that you and they could even disagree about the winnability of a lawsuit, but they still get to make the call. That's there just because someone got sued at some point in the past for doing something like capitulating over what turned out to be nothing, I'm sure.
So, please. Do not bring up freedom of speech. Your constitutional amendment to that effect is irrelevant. At least to this situation.
(Disclaimer: nothing in here says you are wrong for disliking GoDaddy. Just as you're free to express your view, I am mine. I'm not preventing you from blaming free speech - just trying to explain it a bit more.)
Re:"British"? (Score:4, Informative)
GoDaddy, cowardice, and non-free speech. (Score:5, Informative)
Check out this excerpt from their Registration Agreement [godaddy.com]:
It's not exactly a free-speech-friendly contract, is it? You can lose your registration for embarrassing someone. This is why I never moved any of my domains to GoDaddy when I was working for them. You can't count on them to stay out of legal battles that other registrars would ignore. Instead, they'll kill your registration, and expect to be patted on the back for being good citizens.
Sometimes, I think their real problem is that they want everyone to like them.
Re:Go Daddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (Score:3, Informative)
Ireland is not in the U.K. so the laws there have absolutely no bearing on this situation. It is my understanding that the Irish fought against British occupation for several centuries and then topped it off with a war from 1916 to 1922. There's a good new movie out called The Wind that Shakes the Barley [imdb.com] about it.
So, a better question might be, are US hosted websites and registrars under the control of Irish courts? I don't understand how an Irish court ruling makes any difference to a US company. What other countries' courts exercise legal control over US ISPs and registrars?
gmax.net didn't (as I understand it) create the content. They just host the website whose content is presumably created in Ireland, so the Comm.Dec.Act should apply. It's not gmax.net's legal obligation, nor presumably is it GoDaddy's. It's just that GoDaddy apparently will pull the plug on us as soon as someone even threatens to sue!
From digging around a bit more I see that there's a companion website called CrookedLawyers.com [crookedlawyers.com] put out by people called "Victims of the Legal Profession".
Re:Sites that require registration (Score:4, Informative)
The price of phony domain registration (Score:4, Informative)
The owner of that domain is listed as
John Smith
krasnaya ploschad
Moskva 00000
Russian Federation
714987650
lawyercatcher@lawyer.com
("krasnaya ploschad" is Red Square, the big plaza in front of the Kremlin.)
Ordinarily, faced with obnoxious registrar behavior, you can transfer the domain to another registrar. Given this phony domain registration info, thus domain owner can't do that.
That's the price of phony domain registration info - any trouble, and you lose the domain.
DNS Registrar free speech zone (Score:3, Informative)
(-1, Wrong) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Go Daddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't you get it? (Score:3, Informative)
I drive around here every day. No fliers anywhere, except a few staked signs during election time. The ones that do go up, get taken down within a day. I actually timed it once for an unbelieving in-law.
Re:GoDaddy, cowardice, and non-free speech. (Score:2, Informative)