Thu, 22 Oct 2009
Craigslist is not responsible for users' posting of erotic ads (finally)
Seven months ago, Thomas Dart (Sheriff of Cook County) sued Craigslist, alleging that Craigslist is liable for illegal sex ads posted by its users. In particular, he claims that Cragislist's "adult services" section is by definition synonymous with illegal activity. For that reason, Dart argues, Craigslist should be liable for illegal posts by its users.
To quote Tuesday's ruling by District Court for the Northern District of Illinois:
Plaintiff is simply wrong
The ethics of erotic services are, euphemistically, very interesting. At worst (a situation exacerbated by the underground nature of sex workers), powerful people pressure or coerce others into serving as their workers. Sex trafficking is a serious problem that ruins lives, and it is heartbreaking to even think about it. A quick search of the web finds plenty of news stories involving law enforcement finding sex trafficking operations using Craigslist to sell their victims.
These are serious crimes, and they ought to be investigated.
Craigslist often stands in the middle of this; in the case of one New York City-based prostitution ring (not necessarily involved in sex trafficking), Craigslist was the "sole vehicle through which the company operated". When Thomas Dart sues Craigslist, one can sympathize with a desire to make it harder to operate these prostitution rings. When I first heard about this case, I was torn; I do not relish the forced exploitation of people.
A quick look through Philadelphia's "adult services" section finds a lot of women looking to offer men interactive pornography through web cams. That Craigslist is a venue for this does not seem particularly dangerous; the same services can be found by searching the web. Prostitution is (obviously) outlawed by the Cragislist terms of service, though clearly it can be found there.
To return to the story of Thomas Dart, judges must answer legal questions, not necessarily ethical ones. Craigslist is not a person; it is an automatic web site. Congress wrote a law in 1996 that clarifies who is publishing these advertisements: the users' of Craigslist, not the service itself. They are responsible for their actions. (You can read more at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Guide to Section 230 Legal Protections.) This definition seems sensible; Craigslist is like a physical bulletin board with clear rules telling users what to do. As quoted by the EFF, the court wrote:
Intermediaries are not culpable for "aiding and abetting" their customers who misuse their service to commit unlawful acts.
This is important; illegal ads for the same illegal services could just as easily have been posted in a bulletin board supposedly about "Computers and Software". Such a post would have been abuse, just like illegal posts in Craigslist's adult services section. This realization helped me come to my personal conclusion about this case: Craigslist, like a physical bulletin board, ought not to be liable for the actions of its users. Like a cafe, it is a meeting place. One could stamp out all the overt bulletin boards and meeting places in the world and create huge harm to our ability to find people we want to hang out with or do business with and yet still have a world with illegal prostitution.
I was relieved to see that the final ruling in this case preserves our ability to have meeting-places that do not screen the people who enter them for the chance that they will commit crimes while visiting. I was further relieved to discover that a 1996 portion of the much-maligned Communications Decency Act codified this years before I started worrying about it.
P.S. Humorously, in the CNN.com article linked above, the writer makes the word "pornographic" link directly to http://topics.cnn.com/topics/Internet/.
