Disqus Calls On Title 47, Section 230 To Deal With Content Ownership Lawsuit Threat

Someone once told me that you will have arrived when your company receives its first lawsuit threat. If that’s true, Disqus has arrived. We wrote about Disqus, a blog commenting system, upon their launch last month. I’m starting to see more and more blogs incorporating the Disqus system which is a good sign for co-founder Daniel Ha.

This evening Daniel has a post explaining their first lawsuit threat. I am assuming that Disqus only acts as a content repository and that the content within your repository is your own and Disqus claims no responsibility. He calls upon Title 47, Section 230 of the U.S. Code with respect to the complaint.

The complaint includes:

I am the President of a big European company. I will put unlimited funds in trying to get this profile down. You can chose to work with me or face the consequences in a court of Law both in Europe and in the US. I am very sorry that you have declined my request to remove the slander statements about me on your website. I strongly urge you to study the slander and defamation laws in both U.K, Sweden and United States. You might also want to talk to your lawyers about a libel cases especially in the US.

Legal Actions will be taken against you and your company both in Europe and The United States on Wednesday. We will ask for a jury trial.

The part I am not sure about is what procedures does Disqus have in place to deal with these types of complaints. How do they notify the site owner, etc.  If they don’t already have these policies, it’s probably time to create them and post them publicly.

On a funny note, could you just imagine the cast of characters at a Web 2.0 trial? Your honor I’d like to call Robert Scoble. In walks Scoble with a whiteboard to draw the events while people are chatting on Kyte. Next up is Justine who allows her viewers to watch the courtroom through her eyes and every 30 seconds we get an Xtrain commercial. Last up is Jason Calacanis who explains that he likes that the courts still use humans to decide one’s fate and not some algorithym because humans do things better. On breaks, everyone pulls out their iPhone and Twitters the past period’s events.

Daniel ends the explanation with, "we’re not too concerned, but I wanted to take this opportunity to clarify: Disqus makes no claim on your comment content and we take great care to make sure we don’t overstep any bounds. "