Until now, I haven't found an English news source on this, only the judgement and a German source.
The judgement has quite a good summary of what happened:
(Emphasis by me)
So, to reiterate: The company running the comment section deleted the comments as soon as it was notified about them but refused to pay the fine.
This got through Estonian courts, and lastly, the company lost. They appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, stating their right to freedom of speech would be impeded. The appeal was dismissed, but can be appealed again.
Your thoughts? I always thought that if you delete comments when you are notified about them, this should be enough. No fines, no nothing. That would be reasonable, as the only other option would be to manually review each and every comment, which can get a bit tedious.
Or, a bit more populist:
Fake News: City responsible for insult uttered on street, court finds.
The judgement has quite a good summary of what happened:
A. Background of the case
The applicant company is the owner of Delfi, an Internet news portal that publishes up to 330 news articles a day. Delfi is one of the largest news portals on the Internet in Estonia. It publishes news in Estonian and Russian in Estonia and also operates in Latvia and Lithuania.
At the material time, at the end of the body of the news articles there were the words add your comment and fields for comments, the commenters name and his or her email address (optional). Below these fields there were buttons publish the comment and read comments. The part for reading comments left by others was a separate area which could be accessed by clicking on the read comments button. The comments were uploaded automatically and were, as such, not edited or moderated by the applicant company. The articles received about 10,000 readers comments daily, the majority posted under pseudonyms.
Nevertheless, there was a system of notify-and-take-down in place: any reader could mark a comment as leim (an Estonian word for an insulting or mocking message or a message inciting hatred on the Internet) and the comment was removed expeditiously. Furthermore, there was a system of automatic deletion of comments that included certain stems of obscene words. In addition, a victim of a defamatory comment could directly notify the applicant company, in which case the comment was removed immediately.
The applicant company had made efforts to advise users that the comments were not its opinion and that the authors of comments were responsible for their content. On Delfis Internet site there were Rules of comment which included the following:
The functioning of the notice-and-take-down system was also explained in the text.
The Government submitted that in Estonia Delfi had a notorious history of publishing defaming and degrading comments. Thus, on 22 September 2005 the weekly newspaper Eesti Ekspress had published a public letter from the editorial board to the Minister of Justice, the Chief Public Prosecutor and the Chancellor of Justice in which concern was expressed about incessant taunting of people on public websites in Estonia. Delfi was named as a source of brutal and arrogant mockery.
B. Article and comments published on the Internet news portal
On 24 January 2006 the applicant company published an article on the Delfi portal under the heading SLK Destroyed Planned Ice Road. Ice roads are public roads over the frozen sea which are open between the Estonian mainland and some islands in winter. The abbreviation SLK stands for AS Saaremaa Laevakompanii (Saaremaa Shipping Company, a public limited company). SLK provides a public ferry transport service between the mainland and some islands. L. was a member of the supervisory board of SLK and the companys sole or majority shareholder at the material time.
On 24 and 25 January 2006 the article attracted 185 comments. About twenty of them contained personal threats and offensive language directed against L.
On 9 March 2006 L.s lawyers requested the applicant company to remove the offensive comments and claimed 500,000 kroons (EEK) (approximately 32,000 euros (EUR)) in compensation for non-pecuniary damage. The request concerned the following twenty comments:
1. 1. there are currents in [V]äinameri
2. open water is closer to the places you referred to, and the ice is thinner.
Proposal lets do as in 1905, lets go to [K]uressaare with sticks and put [L.] and [Le.] in bag
2. fucking shitheads...
they bath in money anyways thanks to that monopoly and State subsidies and now started to fear that cars may drive to the islands for a couple of days without anything filling their purses. burn in your own ship, sick Jew!
3. good that [La.s] initiative has not broken down the lines of the web flamers. go ahead, guys, [L.] into oven!
4. [little L.] go and drown yourself
5. aha... hardly believe that that [happened] by accident... assholes fck
6. rascal!!! [in Russian]
7. What are you whining, kill this bastard once[.] In the future the other ones ... will know what they will risk, even they will only have one little life.
8. ... is [bloody] right. To be lynched, to warn the other [islanders] and would-be men. Then nothing like that will be done again! In any event, [L.] very much deserves that, doesnt he.
9. a good man lives [long,] a shitty man [a day or two]
10. If there was an iceroad, [one] could easily save 500 for a full car, fckng [L.] pay for that economy, why it takes 3 [hours] for your ferries if they are so good icebreakers, go and break ice in Pärnu port ... instead, fcking monkey, I will pass [the strait] anyways and if I will drown, it is your fault
11. and cant anyone defy the shits?
12. [inhabitants of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa islands], do 1:0 to this dope.
13. wonder whether [L.] wont be trashed in Saaremaa? to screw ones owns like that.
14. The people will chatter for a couple of days in the Internet, but the crooks (and also those who are backed and whom we ourselves have elected to represent us) pocket the money and pay no attention to this flaming no one gives a shit about this.
Once [M.] and other big crooks also used to boss around, but their greed stroke back (RIP). Will also strike back to these crooks sooner or later. As they sow, so shall they reap, but they should nevertheless be contained (by lynching as the state is powerless in respect of them it is really them who govern the state), because they only live for today. Tomorrow, the flood.
15. this [V.] will once get [a blow] from me with a cake.
damn, as soon as you put a cauldron on the fire and there is smoke rising from the chimney of the sauna, the crows from Saaremaa are there thinking that...a pig is going to be slaughtered. no way
16. bastards!!!! Ofelia also has an ice class, so this is no excuse why Ola was required!!!
17. Estonian state, led by scum [and] financed by scum, of course does not prevent or punish the antisocial acts of the scum. But well, each [L.] has his Michaelmas... and this cannot at all be compared to a rams Michaelmas. Actually sorry for [L.] a human, after all...
18. ... if after such acts [L.] should all of a sudden happen to be on sick leave and also in case of the next destruction of the ice road... will he [then] dear to act like a pig for the third time?
19. fucking bastard, that [L.]... could have gone home with my baby soon... anyways his company cannot guarantee a normal ferry service and the prices are such that... real creep... a question arises whose pockets and mouths he has filled up with money so that hes acting like a pig from year to year
20. cant make bread from shit; and paper and internet stand everything; and just for own fun (really the state and [L.] do not care about the peoples opinion)... just for fun, with no greed for money I pee into the [L.s] ear and then I also shit onto his head.
15. On the same day the offensive comments were removed by the applicant company.
16. On 23 March 2006 the applicant company responded to the request from L.s lawyers. It informed L. that the comments had been removed under the notice-and-take-down obligation, and refused the claim for damages.
(Emphasis by me)
So, to reiterate: The company running the comment section deleted the comments as soon as it was notified about them but refused to pay the fine.
This got through Estonian courts, and lastly, the company lost. They appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, stating their right to freedom of speech would be impeded. The appeal was dismissed, but can be appealed again.
Your thoughts? I always thought that if you delete comments when you are notified about them, this should be enough. No fines, no nothing. That would be reasonable, as the only other option would be to manually review each and every comment, which can get a bit tedious.
Or, a bit more populist:
Fake News: City responsible for insult uttered on street, court finds.
