Review Litigation

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

At 06:59 PM 3/7/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:

>We need to be very careful here. A service like "SurfWatch," voluntarily
>used by others, has entered into no contracts with sites to meet defined
>standards of what should and shouldn't be blocked. It is essentially a
>"review" service, like a reviewer of books, movies, restaurants, etc. Sure,
>some books, movies, and restaurants are "hurt" by negative reviews, but
>this is life in a free society. It has not yet reached the point in these
>Beknighted States that a bad review can be the basis of a tort (though I
>could be wrong...nothing would surprise me these days).

There was a recent case of a restaurant suing over a bad review that did go
to trial.  The reviewer won.  There has also been litigation against someone
who wrote a letter to a scientific journal attacking someone else.  The
letter writer won.  Of course both the letter writer and the reviewer had
legal costs because they were unwilling to proceed in forma pauperis.

DCF