Copyright case: Monsarrat v. Newman, USA

A defamation claim, too, was precluded by the Communications Decency Act.

A federal district court in Boston correctly found that the manager of a neighborhood forum could not expose himself to defamation and copyright infringement claims by merely migrating the forum from one web platform to another, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has held. The court, stepping into a bitter personal dispute between members of the online forum, found that the defamation claim was barred by the Communications Decency Act while the copyright infringement claim was precluded by the fair use privilege (Monsarrat v. Newman, March 10, 2022, Stearns, R.).

Case date: 10 March 2022

Case number: No. 21-1146

Court: United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit

A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.